A Tortilla Is Like Life: Food and Culture in the San Luis Valley of Colorado (Louann Atkins Temple Women & Culture)

Citation preview

A TORTILLA IS LIKE LIFE

BOOK

TWENTY-ONE

Louann Atkins Temple Women & Culture Series Books about women and families, and their changing role in society

Southern Colorado and Northern New Mexico. Drawn by Charles Geiger, Millersville University Geo-Graphics Lab.

UNIVERSITY

OF

TEXAS

PRESS

AUSTIN

A Tortilla I s Like Life

Food and Culture in the San Luis Valley of Colorado

CA R O L E M . C O U N I H A N

The Louann Atkins Temple Women & Culture Series is supported by Allison, Doug, Taylor, and Andy Bacon; Margaret, Lawrence, Will, John, and Annie Temple; Larry Temple; the Temple-Inland Foundation; and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Copyright

© 2009 by the University of Texas Press

All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America First edition, 2009

Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to: Permissions University of Texas Press P.O. Box 7819, Austin, TX 78713-7819 www.utexas.edu/utpress/about/bpermission.html The paper used in this book meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (R1997) (Permanence of Paper). Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Counihan, Carole, 1948– A tortilla is like life : food and culture in the San Luis valley of Colorado / Carole M. Counihan. p. cm. — (Louann Atkins Temple women & culture series; bk. 21) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-292-71981-1 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Food habits—Colorado—Antonito—History. 2. Food—Symbolic aspects— Colorado—Antonito. 3. Hispanic Americans—Food—Colorado—Antonito. 4. Hispanic Americans—Colorado—Antonito—Ethnic identity. 5. Hispanic Americans—Land tenure—Colorado—Antonito. 6. Hispanic American women— Colorado—Antonito—Social conditions. 7. Antonito (Colo.)—History. 8. Antonito (Colo.)—Social life and customs. I. Title. GT2853.U5C68 2009 394.1'2097883—dc22 2009028211

To my children and grandchildren, Ben, Will, Marisela, Kraig, Julian, William, Kristina, and Kamille And to all the children and grandchildren, our bridge to the future.

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C O N T E N T S

Preface | xiii Acknowledgments | xv C H A P T E R

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“I Did Do Something”: Food-Centered Life Histories in Antonito, Colorado Why Antonito | Methodology: Food-Centered Life Histories and Testimonios | History of Antonito | Antonito Today | Study Participants | The Ethnographic Process | Helen Ruybal and Carole Counihan on Ethnography | Conclusion C H A P T E R

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“The Stereotypes Have to Be Broken”: Identity and Ethnicity in Antonito Antonito: An Insider/Outsider Perspective | Janice DeHerrera on Antonito | Language and Education, Spanish and English | Teddy Madrid on Freedom of Speech | Ramona Valdez on English and Spanish | Helen Ruybal on Learning English and Being Smart | Teddy Madrid on Learning English from the Presbyterians | Ethnic, Gender, and Religious Identity | Ramona Valdez on Ethnic Terminology | Teddy Madrid on the Connection with Spain | Discrimination and Prejudice | Helen Ruybal on Discrimination | Teddy Madrid on Multiple Identities and Axes of Prejudice | Ramona Valdez on Religious and Anti-Hispanic Prejudice | Bernadette Vigil on Chicano Consciousness | Teddy Madrid on Identity, Terminology, and Prejudice | Conclusion C H A P T E R

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“Part of This World”: Meanings of Land and Water History of Land: Acquisition and Loss | Helen Ruybal’s Land Acquisition and Sale | Land and Its Meanings | Monica Taylor’s Dream of Land, Family, and Place | Monica Taylor’s Perceptions of the Land | Ramona Valdez on the Meanings of Land | Teddy Madrid on Land, Home, and Family | Water in the Southwest | The Multiple Meanings and Uses of Water | Teddy

Madrid on the Traditional Uses of Water | Teddy Madrid on Water as a Commodity | Janice DeHerrera on Water as a Commodity | Monica Taylor on Water as Life | Conclusion: Land, Water, Place, and Chicano Cultural Ecology C H A P T E R

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“Anything You Want Is Going to Come from the Earth”: The Traditional Diet The Locally Produced Subsistence Diet | Ramona Valdez’s Food Narrative | Meat: Domesticated and Wild Animal Foods | Helen Ruybal on Raising Cattle and Beef | Teddy Madrid on Fishing, Hunting, and Making Jerky | Cultivated Foods: Grains, Beans, Vegetables, and Fruits | Asuncionita Mondragon on Her Grandparents’ Garden in La Isla | Teddy Madrid on Food Production in Las Mesitas | Bernadette Vigil on Red and Green Chili | Gathered Plant Foods and Medicines | Helen Ruybal on the Importance of Piñon in Her Family | Teddy Madrid on Gathering Wild Foods in Las Mesitas | Ramona Valdez on Healing Herbs | Conclusion: Food, Place, and Culture C H A P T E R

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“We’ve Got to Provide for the Family”: Women, Food, and Work Production, Reproduction, and Gender | Helen Ruybal’s Story of Courtship and Marriage | Gender Expectations and Practices | Teddy Madrid on Her Family’s Flexible Gender Division of Labor | Monica Taylor on the Strong Women in Her Family | Helen Ruybal on Gender Relations and Ideals | Women and Food Work | Teddy Madrid on Food Preservation | Monica Taylor on Gardening and Preserving Food | Janice DeHerrera on Food Preparation | Earning Money with Food | Helen Ruybal on Making and Selling Cheese | Ramona Valdez on Working in the Fields | Celina Romero on Working as a Cook and Field Hand | Asuncionita Mondragon on Raising Poultry and Selling Eggs | Balancing Work and Home | Teddy Madrid’s First Paycheck | Teddy Madrid on Being a Working Woman | Janice DeHerrera on Balancing Job and Home | Conclusion C H A P T E R

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“It’s a Feeling Thing”: Cooking and Women’s Agency Cooking and Agency | Teddy Madrid’s Cooking Adventures | To Cook or Not to Cook | Helen Ruybal’s and Her Sister’s Different Approaches to Cooking | Janice DeHerrera’s Cooking Expectations | Cooking, Self-Expression, and Emotional Connection | Janice DeHerrera on Creativity and Cooking | Janice DeHerrera on Cooking as Emotional Communication | Cordi Ornelas’s Paella | Learning and Teaching Cooking | Janice DeHerrera on Learning How to Cook | Monica Taylor on Learning to Cook and the Family Biscochito Recipe | Cooking and Gender | Teddy Madrid on Cooking after Marriage | Helen Ruybal on Her Husband's Cooking | Monica Taylor on the Chili Wars | Conclusion

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“Meals Are Important, Maybe It’s Love”: Mexicano Meals and Family Family in Antonito | Janice DeHerrera on Family Ties versus Individual Ambition | Teddy Madrid on Her Father’s Family Charge | Mexicano Family Meals | Martha Mondragon on Family Meals and Television | Janice DeHerrera on the Importance of the Family Meal | Meals and Gender Roles | Janice DeHerrera on Restaurants, Her First Communion, and Family Gender Power | Meals, Socialization, and Respect | Janice DeHerrera on Meals in Her Family of Origin | Martha Mondragon on Grace before Meals | Teddy Madrid on Family Meals, Respect, and Socialization | Asuncionita Mondragon on Teaching Spanish at Family Meals | Conclusion C H A P T E R

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“It Was a Give-and-Take”: Sharing and Generosity versus Greed and Envy Cooperative Labor Exchanges | Cordi Ornelas on Work Parties | Yolanda Salazar on Making and Selling Tamales | Sharing and Generosity | Asuncionita Mondragon on Sharing Food with Neighbors | Helen Ruybal on Sharing Honey and Meat | Greed and Envy | Carmen Lopez and Helen Ruybal on Sharing, Cuzco, and Envidia | Helen Ruybal on Envy | Envy and Witchcraft | Helen Ruybal on Witchcraft, Curanderas, and Envy | Conclusion C H A P T E R

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“Come Out of Your Grief”: Death and Commensality The Wake | Cordi Ornelas on Foods at the Wake | Helen Ruybal on Death, Velorios, and Funerals | Food Gifts for the Bereaved | Janice DeHerrera on Food and Death | Martha Mondragon on Death and Food Sharing | Farewell Dinners | Yolanda Salazar on Death, Community, and Commensality | Helen Ruybal on Farewell Dinners | Rending and Mending Community | Helen Ruybal on Different Funeral Traditions | Teddy Madrid on Presbyterian Funeral Feasts | Janice DeHerrera on the Meaning of Food at Funerals | Conclusion C H A P T E R

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“Give Because It Multiplies”: Hunger and Response in Antonito Poverty and Food Insecurity | Bernadette Vigil on Caring and Hunger | Janice DeHerrera on Traditions of Sharing Food | Traditional Foodways, Sharing, and Making Do | Teddy Madrid on Hunger, Scarcity, and Sharing | Janice DeHerrera on Making Do with Beans, Tortillas, and Potatoes | Hunger in School | Janice DeHerrera on Hunger in the Elementary School | The Antonito Food Bank | Teddy Madrid on Presbyterian Support of the Food Bank | Janice DeHerrera on Hunger, Conscience, and the Food Bank | Conclusion

Contents

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Conclusion: “Our People Will Survive” The Fourth of July Meal | Unpacking the Fourth of July Meal | Explanations for the Antonito Diet | Toward the Future

A P P E N D I X

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Topics in Food-Centered Life Histories A P P E N D I X

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Categories of Analysis A P P E N D I X

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Population of Antonito, Conejos County, and Colorado, 1880–2000 A P P E N D I X

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Wild Plants Used for Food or Healing in the Antonito Area

Notes | 211 Glossary of Spanish Terms | 227 Bibliography | 231 Index | 247

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This book is an introduction to the unique Hispanic community of Antonito in Conejos County, Colorado, just six miles north of the New Mexico border and 110 miles north of Santa Fe. Most people in Antonito reported having Spanish, Mexican, and Indian ancestors, sprinkled with various “Anglo” influences. Their community’s roots lie in the mixed ranching and farming subsistence economy of the early Hispanic settlers in the Upper Rio Grande region who came north from New Mexico in the mid-nineteenth century and pushed out the Utes and Navajos. They laid claim to the land by living on it, cultivating it, grazing their animals on it, and building acequias to irrigate it. This long-standing Hispanic community and culture is presented through the words of several Antonito women. I gathered their words in food-centered life history interviews between 1996 and 2006. I use food as a lens through which to see Mexicanas’ relation to land, labor, family, and community—to see their world through their eyes. Because this book is based on diverse people’s stories about their lives, it presents multiple views based on remembered worlds. People always censor and embellish their memories, and others in Antonito would see the same things quite differently. Three frames organize women’s food-centered life histories. The first is the examination of their sense of belonging in place and history that is a hallmark of what Latino scholars have called cultural citizenship. The second frame is Chicano environmentalism, which seeks to promote just and sustainable communities and to document Mexicano food production and land and water use. The third frame is a melding of Latina feminism and feminist ethnography, which prioritizes the perspectives and experiences of women, especially those like the rural Mexicanas in this book who have been previously excluded from the pages of history.

By including their voices, I hope not only to describe Antonito culture but also to promote its survival. To that end, and in the belief that education is the path to empowerment, all royalties are going to the Antonito Scholarship Fund at Adams State College.

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Deepest thanks to all the people of Antonito—to everyone who gave a hello or a welcoming smile, change at the cash register, mail or DVDs, gas or haircuts, baseball coaching or refereeing, delicious meals, good talk, friendship, and insight. Very special thanks to the women who participated in this study, spent countless hours in conversation with me, and allowed me to tape record their stories. Several people in Antonito read this manuscript in one of its previous incarnations: thanks to them for support and advice. I also wish to thank the anonymous reviewers for the University of Texas Press. My friends and colleagues Meredith Abarca and Melissa Salazar put aside their own work to read a draft at a critical moment and have been inspirational scholars. Thanks to Tammy Lopez and Adams State College, Kathi Figgen and Leonard Velasquez for their insights on the San Luis Valley and their friendship, and Mary Romero for suggesting the San Luis Valley. Millersville University generously afforded me a sabbatical leave, and the Faculty Grants Committee has offered consistent support. The Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education gave me a released time grant, and the National Endowment for the Humanities awarded me a 2005–2006 fellowship for the writing of this book thanks to the support of Stanley Brandes and Pat Zavella. Charles Geiger of the Millersville University Geo-Graphics Lab made the maps. Theresa May and the University of Texas Press were patient while I rewrote and rewrote and rewrote. Last, I give deep thanks to Jim Taggart for comradeship and steadfastness on the wild ride.

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A TORTILLA IS LIKE LIFE

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“I Did Do Something”

Food-Centered Life Histories in Antonito, Colorado

This book is based on food-centered life histories that I collected between 1996 and 2006 with Mexicanas in the small town of Antonito in the southern San Luis Valley of Colorado. Ninety percent of the population of Antonito identified themselves as Hispanic in the 2000 U.S. Census. They had deep roots in the Upper Rio Grande region and could point to Spanish, Mexican, Native American, and European ancestry. They were not “Mexican” or “Anglo” but part of a Hispanic cultural group spanning the geographic region from Santa Fe north to Antonito since the sixteenth century. I interviewed nineteen women about their foodways— their beliefs and behaviors surrounding food production, distribution, preparation, and consumption. This book makes extensive use of excerpts from those interviews to give voice to the women of Antonito. Three lines of inquiry frame this book. The first brings together Latina feminism and feminist ethnography by focusing on the diverse insider perspectives of Mexicanas and by sharing the stage with them. The second comes from Flores and Benmayor’s (1998) concept of cultural citizenship and asks whether Antonito Mexicanas’ have cultural as well as political citizenship, that is, not just political rights but also a sense

of community, place, and “cultural belonging” (Silvestrini 1997, 44). The third line of inquiry comes from Chicano environmentalism (Peña 1998a) and documents the way in which Antonito Mexicanas knew land and water and used them to sustain families and communities for more than one hundred fifty years.

Why Antonito Ethnographic fieldwork consists of learning about a culture by living in a community and conducting long-term participant observation and in-depth interviews. My husband, the anthropologist James Taggart, and I share the conviction that fieldwork is the lifeblood of anthropology and that it is fascinating and compelling work. Since Jim’s previous fieldwork had been in Spain and Mexico and mine had been in Italy, we did not have a common fieldwork language. We had been looking for a fieldwork site where we could both work and raise our young sons, Ben and Willie. A fortuitous visit by the sociologist Mary Romero to Millersville University in 1990 launched our interest in the San Luis Valley. Jim contacted Kathi Figgen, who was then the state folklorist for southern Colorado. She suggested we consider Antonito, whose Hispanic community was of long standing and where older people still spoke Spanish as well as English, though younger people spoke only English. We did more research and found that Stanford University folklorist, Juan B. Rael, a native of nearby Arroyo Hondo, New Mexico, had done an extensive study in southern Colorado and northern New Mexico in the 1930s and 1940s and amassed a rich collection of stories, plays, songs, and religious traditions.1 We found, however, little recent ethnographic research on Colorado Mexicanos. In summer 1995 Jim and I and our sons spent three weeks in the Antonito area, visiting several towns and getting a sense of the place. By the end of our stay, we decided to do our research in Antonito because it had been an important cultural and commercial crossroads and the people were friendly. After trying to find a place to rent, we ended up buying a house in the middle of town and going there every summer and Christmas for ten years, conducting interviews and getting to know the town. That ethnographic research is possible never ceases to amaze me: it involves crossing the boundaries of distance between strangers and opening up to each other in quite intimate ways.2 Ethnographers usually travel from our homeplace to someone else’s, often where we know no one. We have to meet people, explain why we are there, and enlist

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The author’s sons, Ben and Will Taggart, in their Antonito baseball uniforms.

assistance. People usually do agree to help, and they spend hours talking to us, responding to our improbable questions and speaking about their own concerns, often on tape. People in Antonito were no exception. The town was small and welcoming, and little by little we made friends and found participants for our research. We met people at the post office, in the grocery store, at the restaurants, on the street, and in the neighborhood. We enrolled our sons when they were ages nine and six in Antonito Youth Baseball, and both played through age thirteen. We came to know many people at practices and games and learned a lot about Antonito and its rivalry with nearby La Jara, Manassa, and Sanford as we cheered the Antonito teams. I connected with the women of Antonito across many differences and some similarities. Like me, many were wives and mothers. But there were many differences between us. I have a Ph.D. and am a tenured professor with excellent pay and benefits, available to few in Antonito. I can come and go as I wish, enjoying Antonito’s beauty and vibrancy in summer and skipping its cold, windy, long, and sometimes bleak winter. I can escape or ignore the gossip and conflicts that are as common in Antonito as in small towns everywhere, whereas the women who live there have to endure the slights. I struggle to get beneath the surface, whereas they have multilayered, nuanced understandings of their community. Several of them are bilingual in Spanish and English, whereas I have command of written and spoken English but only a superficial knowledge of Spanish. I am “Anglo”; they are “Hispanic.”

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Relations between Anglos and Hispanics in the Southwest have had a long history of conflict steeped in racist discourse about land, water, power, and rights.3 Antonito was not immune to this history, as Joe Taylor so eloquently describes in Alex and the Hobo (Taylor and Taggart 2003). Because many Mexicanos from Antonito have encountered racial slurs and discrimination from Anglos, it was reasonable to assume that they would have some diffidence toward us when we arrived as strangers in Antonito. To combat that diffidence, I fell back on the principles of anthropology: a respect for individual and cultural diversity, a commitment to honesty and confidentiality, and an acknowledgment that ethnocentrism is real and must be constantly guarded against.4 Anthropology is based on the premise that human beings can communicate and approach understandings across differences—of class, culture, nation, geography, language, and customs. We connect by finding shared identities. And although I am Anglo and have a privileged urban, white, upper-middle-class background, in my ancestry are roots that connect me with the people of Antonito. On my father’s side, my ancestors were Irish all the way back, and the history of Irish oppression was part of my upbringing in mid-twentieth-century Boston. Although I experienced little discrimination myself, I was raised in an environment where ethnic and racial prejudice were condemned and social justice was valued. My mother’s ancestry gave me connections to the people of Antonito in a different way, for she was born in northern New Mexico, in the town of Las Vegas, and her mother grew up a few miles outside Las Vegas, on a ranch in Rociada, in an area of Ponderosa pine forests and grazing lands. I was given my grandmother Marie Dunn’s name as my middle name, and my mother always told me I was just like her. Her mother, Marie Anna Pendaries, was born in France in 1852 and came to the United States when she was four years old, crossing from Kansas to New Mexico with a wagon train. My maternal grandmother’s father, Richard Dunn, was born in Maine in 1846 of Scottish immigrant parents, and he traveled to New Mexico via wagon train as a teenager. My great-grandparents met in Las Vegas, New Mexico, where he worked at the Plaza Hotel, which her father, Jean Pendaries, helped build. My grandmother Marie grew up in the Southwest and moved east after she married Wallace Watson, my grandfather. I never got a chance to talk to my grandmother about her childhood in northern New Mexico, because she died when I was nine years old, but I inherited from her a connection to the Southwest. Although I had never lived more than three hours from the ocean in

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my entire life, I loved the Rocky Mountains of southern Colorado and northern New Mexico the moment I saw them. Although I am not of the place myself, I can share the appreciation of my research subjects for their beloved homeland.

Methodology: Food-Centered Life Histories and Testimonios Tape-recorded semistructured interviews constitute the main substance of this book. I also took more than five hundred pages of fieldnotes over the course of eight summers. I wrote about conversations I had, places I visited, and events I participated in, such as birthdays, baseball games, and community meetings. I also collected recipes and took many photos. Over thirty years of research I have found that food provides a powerful voice and sparks meaningful memories for many people. Moreover, Hispanic culture in the San Luis Valley revolved around subsistence food production until after World War II, when the local ranching and farming economy began to decline (Deutsch 1987). My goal in this book is to weave diverse women’s voices together to create a cultural mosaic revealing who they are and how they relate to food, place, and people. The experiences and voices of women—particularly those belonging to economically and politically marginalized ethnic groups—have too long been absent from the historical record. Recuperating them enriches our understanding of American culture and is a central goal in feminist ethnography and oral history.5 My food-centered life history methodology emulates the testimonio genre, a form of writing that emerged out of Latin American liberation movements.6 Testimonios are ordinary people’s narratives about events they have witnessed that center on a compelling “story that needs to be told—involving a problem of repression, poverty, subalternity, exploitation, or simply survival” (Beverly 1993, 73; original emphasis). Like ethnography, testimonios are based on collaboration between the narrator-witness and the compiler-ethnographer. Testimonios seek “to rewrite and to retell . . . history and reality from the people’s perspective,” as diverse and complex as that may be (Gugelberger and Kearney 1991, 11). While many testimonios are based on one individual’s experience, some, like this book, consist of a “polyphonic testimonio” composed of several different voices from one community (Beverly 1993, 74). I wanted to provide a forum for Antonito women to articulate their views of the world and to keep alive the stories, history, and culture of Mexicanas of the remote and relatively unknown southern San Luis Valley of Colo-

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rado.7 The diverse female perspectives on Antonito culture and foodways complement the male views described by Taylor and Taggart (2003) in their collaborative study of Antonito.8 Before doing interviews, I established informed consent, telling people in Antonito who I was and what I was doing there, promising confidentiality, and giving them the choice to participate or not. Interviews were loosely structured and took place either in my kitchen or in the women’s homes, according to their preference. I usually set up the interviews ahead of time and told potential participants that I wanted to ask questions about food in their lives. I asked for their permission to tape-record, explaining that I wanted to have their verbatim comments about their culture, but I also told them that they could turn the tape recorder off at any time and decline to answer any questions, which people did on occasion. While I tried eventually to address all the topics on my list (see Appendix 1), interviews were conversations with their own momentum and wandered into many nonfood topics. My questions focused on diet, meals, celebrations, rituals, gardening, farming, food preservation, infant and child feeding, meanings of water and land, and food exchanges. Food triggered many interesting memories and stories, which led in turn not only to the women’s descriptions of places, activities, and events but also to their perceptions and feelings. I conducted a total of fifty-five interviews with nineteen women (and six interviews with men) and amassed approximately eighty hours of tape recordings. Several student assistants and I transcribed the tapes into approximately two thousand pages of text.9 I gave respondents bound copies of their verbatim interview transcriptions so that they could request corrections or deletions and keep them for posterity. In moving from transcriptions to book, I compiled a keyword table of contents of the interviews and then sorted segments of the interviews into nineteen main categories (see Appendix 2). Then I wrote several drafts with the aim of creating a medley of individuals’ voices that communicated the complexity of their food and culture. Inspired by testimonios and out of a desire to balance my voice with those of my research partners, I have written an introduction to each chapter and then presented relevant excerpts from participants’ interviews, adding brief connecting commentary. To mark our different voices, my words and the words of my subjects are distinguished typographically. I have not followed some ethnographers’ practice of quoting transcriptions verbatim, but at the urging of participants I have edited the transcriptions to achieve readability while staying as close to

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their original language as possible. I eliminated repetition and most filler expressions (e.g., “like,” “and,” “you know”), edited lightly, and organized excerpts to achieve greater coherence. In the process of doing the research and writing this book, I grappled with issues of balance as I tried to forge my own voice and simultaneously to keep participants’ voices as prominent and authentic as possible, to lead interviews toward food topics but also to listen to whatever the women wanted to talk about.10 Antonito Mexicanas’ accounts contribute to a long literature by and about Hispanic women who have used food as an important part of their storytelling. Cabeza de Baca Gilbert ([1942] 1970, [1949] 1982, [1954] 1994) wrote about the recipes, cooking, and culture of Hispanic Las Vegas, New Mexico. Jaramillo ([1939] 1981, [1955] 2000) used long descriptions of foodways in her memoir of growing up in northern New Mexico, and she too produced a cookbook. Many of the Mexican American women interviewed by Elsasser and colleagues (1980) in northern New Mexico and Martin (1992, 2004) in southern Arizona described foodways and dishes similar to those of Antonito. Abarca (2006) made “culinary chats” the center of her study of Mexican and Mexican American working-class women, and Pérez (2004) used “kitchen-table ethnography” to compare the lives of Mexicanas in Las Cruces, New Mexico, and Casas Grandes, Chihuahua, Mexico. My book contributes to these studies by presenting the food stories of Hispanic women on the northern extremes of the Upper Rio Grande region.

History of Antonito The small Mexicano town of Antonito was on the northern frontier of Greater Mexico and “the colonial empire of New Spain” (Stoller 1982, xx). “Greater Mexico,” according to Américo Paredes (1976, xiv), refers to “all the areas inhabited by people of a Mexican culture” in the United States and Mexico.11 It refers in particular to that region in the southwestern United States that was part of Mexico until the end of the Mexican-American War in 1848, when the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ceded this region—almost half of Mexico’s territory—to the United States. Antonito was settled by descendants of both the earliest Europeans on the continent and the indigenous peoples of North America. It had roots in a very old Hispanic culture, yet was also an important site of Anglo settlement and capitalist and mercantile expansion; it was a meeting place of Anglo and Hispanic worlds. These varied roots were manifest in the complex issues surrounding identity discussed in Chapter 2.

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In 1821, when Mexico gained independence from Spain, the Ute Indians were the main inhabitants of this region, along with the Apache and Navajo. In 1832, in an effort to populate the area, the Mexican government gave the Conejos Land Grant to four families. Indians chased out the early settlers, but in 1852 a group of Mexicanos came to stay.12 Swadesh writes: The first settlers of the San Luis Valley were a group of Conejos grantees led by “Tata” Atanacio Trujillo of El Rito [New Mexico], a beaver trapper, sheepman, and trader to the Utes, who for some years past had been coming to the Valley. The settlers brought with them an image of San Rafael and within a few years built a chapel dedicated to this saint. The first communities were Rincones, San Rafael, Mesitas, and Mogote. (1974, 77)

In 1854 another group of settlers, under the leadership of Jose Maria Jaquez (or Jaques), built the plaza of Guadalupe east of San Rafael on the Conejos River. They were soon joined by the Ute Indian agent Lafayette Head, also known as Rafael Cabeza, who in 1876 was elected lieutenant governor of Colorado (Swadesh 1973, 141). Hispanic settlement of what became Conejos County proceeded rapidly after the 1850s, and by 1872 church records show that Conejos Parish had about three thousand members, most from northern New Mexico’s Rio Arriba County and some from Taos and other counties.13 Anglos arrived in growing numbers in the late nineteenth century. The first Mormon pioneers came to the area in 1878 and established churches, farms, and towns—Sanford, La Jara, and Manassa.14 The Denver and Rio Grande Railroad built a line through the Antonito area between Alamosa, Colorado, and Española and Santa Fe, New Mexico, in 1881. Landowners in the county seat of Conejos refused to sell land for the depot, so the railroad established its station and a new town in Antonito and built the Palace Hotel there in 1902 for its workers and travelers (Weigle 1975, 1). Antonito is part of the Upper Rio Grande region, what Martínez (1998, 70) calls the siete condados del norte: “the seven contiguous rural counties in northern New Mexico and southern Colorado that have Chicana/o demographic majorities.”15 Antonito has a much higher percentage of Hispanics than Conejos County as a whole (90 percent and 60 percent, respectively) and thus is a repository of Hispanic culture, yet it has always been a meeting place of diverse people on the Anglo-Hispanic frontier (Deutsch 1987). Antonito was the site of the transformation of the

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Antonito Railroad Depot, now abandoned, and San Antonio Mountain.

economy from subsistence to commercial ventures and land speculation, which benefited Anglo outsiders more than local Mexicanos. Antonito grew steadily between 1881 and 1950 due to its commercial importance— sawmills, perlite mines, sheep and cattle ranching, and agriculture—with its population peaking in 1950 at 1,255 (see Appendix 1).16 But at the end of the twentieth century lumber was logged out, sheepherding and ranching were barely surviving droughts and low meat prices, perlite mining was faltering, the railroad had diminished in importance, and the population had declined to 872.

Antonito Today Today the town of Antonito is a small, dusty, urban center consisting of eight blocks running from east to west and twelve blocks running south to north along U.S. Highway 285 in southern Colorado. Most of the streets were dirt until 2004, when the town won state grants and raised funds through a bond issue to pave them. The modest homes are organized on a grid pattern. A few are adobe, some are concrete, and others are trailers and single- or double-wide manufactured homes. They are surrounded by small yards with some combination of flowers, grass, shrubs, trees (Chinese elm, aspen, spruce, willow, apricot, crab apple, cat’s claw), weeds, swings, rocks, or piles of potentially serviceable used goods.

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At the west end of town, a publicly funded mental health clinic stands next to the Guadalupe Health Center. There is a pharmacy, a locally owned supermarket, three restaurants, a seasonal hamburger stand, two gas stations, a video store, a barbershop, a hair salon, and several gift and used-goods stores. A small high school and an elementary school serve a student population of about 450 from Antonito and the surrounding agricultural hamlets of Conejos, Guadalupe, Mogote, Las Mesitas, San Rafael, San Antonio, Ortiz, and Lobatos. The population is stable at 872, after dropping 30 percent between 1950 and 1990. Poverty is widespread in Antonito and Conejos County; the county has the second-lowest per capita income in Colorado and one of the lowest in the nation (Aguilar 2002). Furthermore, as Pulido (1998, 125) put it, “Poverty is highly racialized in the region,” striking Mexicanos at high rates. Lucky are those who work for public entities such as the schools, the town, the county, the hospitals, and the health services, for they draw regular salaries and benefits, even though these are low compared to elsewhere in Colorado. In 2000 perlite miners were earning $16 to $18 an hour and were among the best-paid workers, living in the nicest houses and driving the newest trucks, but the mines suffered periodic slowdowns and layoffs and were effectively shut down by 2008.17 Many people commute thirty miles north to the larger town of Alamosa (pop. 9,000),18 to work for minimum wage or little more in the service economy, relying on private vehicles due to lack of public transportation. But, as Teddy Madrid noted in 2005, “with the hike in gas prices, this will entail an extra hardship.” Other people get by with odd jobs, baby-sitting, trading in used goods, and public assistance. In the summer a small tourist economy exists due to hunting, fishing, and vacationing in the nearby San Juan Mountains and the popular Cumbres & Toltec Scenic Railroad, which runs between Antonito and Chama, New Mexico, over the spectacularly beautiful San Juans. The railroad, however, has been constantly beset by problems, including management difficulties and fire hazards due to drought, which in 2002 halted the trains until July 30, causing the loss of two months of the season. After a couple of management changes, the railroad predicted a thriving season for 2008, with daily trips from May 24 to October 19.19

Study Participants Over eight summers I interviewed nineteen women, some once and others several times. In 2000 the study participants ranged in age from thirtytwo to ninety-four.20 Most held several occupations across their lives, 12

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Study Participants Number of Interviews

Date of Birth

Helen Ruybal*

17

1906

Naomi Mestas

1

1907

Dolores Conlin (pseudonym)

1

1910

Virgie Garcia

1

1912

Anna Garcia

1

1919

Ramona Valdez*

7

1919

Celina Romero

1

1920

Cordi Ornelas**

2

1925

Asuncionita Mondragon**

2

1930

Lucy Valdez

1

1930?

Teddy Madrid*

6

1934

Carmen Lopez (pseudonym)

1

1940?

Claudine Romero

1

1943?

Norma Romero

1

1948?

Bernadette Vigil (pseudonym)

2

1948

Janice DeHerrera*

5

1955

Monica Taylor**

3

1960

Yolanda Salazar (pseudonym)

1

1966

Martha Mondragon**

1

1968

Interviewee

Notes: *Major voices

**Secondary voices

including farmer, rancher, racehorse owner, teacher, cook, cafeteria worker, secretary, bookkeeper, liquor store owner, mayor, heavy equipment operator, social services worker, sales clerk, bus driver, child care worker, postmistress, waitress, mother, housewife, and community volunteer. Some were my neighbors, others I met through friends, and many I came to know through Antonito Youth Baseball. I met some of the women for the first time at the interviews; others I had already known for years. All consented willingly to the interviews and to being tape-recorded. Of the nineteen women I interviewed, four figure prominently in this book and another four speak as supporting characters, with occasional comments from some of the remaining eleven. Two women, Helen Ruybal and Teddy Madrid, play a major role throughout the book. They were a generation apart, and both were teachers for many years; in fact, Helen had been Teddy’s first-grade teacher in the tiny Las Mesitas school. Both were born into families of small rancher-farmers, and both of their fathers earned money at various jobs, with Helen’s running a small store and Teddy’s emigrating periodically for wage work. Neither family was rich, but both valued education. One of Helen’s three siblings also went to college and became a teacher, and Teddy and all her siblings achieved master’s degrees. Both Helen and Teddy married and had two children. Their incomes from teaching enabled them to purchase land, further their children’s education, and have relatively egalitarian marriages. Because of their education and long professional careers, Helen and Teddy were somewhat extraordinary, yet still fit within cultural norms. Helen’s and Teddy’s voices are prominent in this book not only because our paths crossed often but also because of their interest in contributing to the project. Although she was ninety years old when we became neighbors, Helen Ruybal still took a daily walk around the St. Augustine Church and back to her home. I ran into her often, we chatted, and eventually I asked her if she would like to do an interview. Over the years I called her regularly and invited her to my house for coffee and cake or a meal. Although she did not like to cook, she loved to eat and was an enthusiastic visitor. One time Helen came over after she got locked out of her house, and our son Ben ran to her house, climbed in through an open window, and unlocked the door for her. When we built a new fence to replace one that was falling down, we added a gate out to the street across from Helen’s house, which pleased her immensely. She had a sharp memory and a keen wit, and she loved to make jokes at her own expense. Helen was born Elena Gallegos, the second of four children, in 1906 in the hamlet of Lobatos, five miles east of Antonito, into a family of 14

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Helen Ruybal in the author’s kitchen.

Teddy Madrid in the author’s kitchen.

Ramona Valdez in her living room.

Janice DeHerrera doing an interview in her dining room.

small farmer-ranchers who ran a store out of their home. After completing elementary school, she went to Loretto Academy boarding school in Santa Fe, where she started calling herself Helen, and later to Adams State College. At twenty-six she married Carlos Ruybal, a rancher, who died in 1982. Together, little by little, they amassed about a thousand acres and a sizable cattle operation while Helen taught school. Their daughter, Carla, who was born in 1933 and died in 1981, and their son, Ben, who was born in 1934, both became teachers. I interviewed Teddy Madrid seven times between 2003 and 2006 after meeting her through Antonito Youth Baseball. Her grandsons, John and Food-Centered Life Histories in Antonito, Colorado

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Anthony, were the same ages as my sons, played on the same team, and were among their best friends in town. Born Teodora Sofia Ruybal in 1934, the second of nine children, Teddy graduated from the Las Mesitas school and attended Western State College in Gunnison, Colorado, for two years, then transferred to Adams State College in Alamosa from which she graduated cum laude in 1960. She married Vincent Madrid, who ran a service station in Antonito for many years. Teddy had a forty-year career in education as both a teacher and an administrator. In 1969 she attained a master’s degree in special education from Adams State College. She had two children and four grandchildren. Her son was a high school history teacher in Alamosa, and her daughter was a K-12 music teacher in Colorado Springs. Teddy was an energetic woman with sharp insight, a thoughtful mind, and a rich memory. She grew up in the small ranching community of Las Mesitas and remembered her family producing much of their own food. Almost as central as Teddy and Helen in the first half of the book is Ramona Valdez. Born in 1919, she had just turned eighty when I met her, and we did seven interviews between 1999 and 2001. She lived just a block away from me in Antonito. Because of poor health, she was largely housebound and enjoyed visitors. A couple of times a week I gave her a call, and if she was free, she always welcomed me to come over and talk. Usually she sat in her recliner in the living room and periodically adjusted it to lessen the constant pain she endured from a lifelong congenital hip disorder. She was a delightful conversationalist with a lively mind. Ramona had an excellent memory of her childhood days on the family ranch on the north bank of the Conejos River, just east of the hamlet of Guadalupe. She had two siblings—an older sister, Elena, who became a teacher, married, and moved to New Mexico; and an older brother, Cres, who took over the family ranch after their father retired and ran it with his wife, Lucy, and their five children. After Cres died, Ramona remained close to her sister-in-law, nieces, and nephews, who lived far and wide but visited her often. After our seventh interview, Ramona told me she was repeating herself and not to do any more tape recordings but to keep coming over to talk, and to take notes if I wanted. On one occasion I was talking to her about a song people used to sing in Antonito, and she was telling me the verses, which I was painstakingly writing down in my mediocre Spanish. In an exasperated voice, she said, “Why don’t you have your tape recorder?”

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Cordi Ornelas in her yard hanging chicos out to dry.

Monica Taylor in her kitchen.

Asuncionita Mondragon in her kitchen.

Martha Mondragon in front of her van at the author’s house.

“But you told me not to bring it any more!” I replied—and then we both burst out laughing. Ramona had numerous health problems but maintained her sense of humor and good spirits right up until she died, on November 3, 2003. I did five taped interviews and had many conversations and meals with Janice Garcia DeHerrera who was raised in Albuquerque and Dallas/Fort Worth and whose mother was from Ortiz, a few miles southwest of Antonito. Janice had visited Antonito regularly over the years for family reunions, weddings, funerals, and Fourth of July celebrations. At

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age twenty-six, Janice had a degree from the University of New Mexico (UNM) and was working in the UNM library when she reconnected at a family reunion in Antonito with a distant cousin, Ted DeHerrera, a telephone lineman she had known off and on for years. After a whirlwind courtship of two months, Janice quit her job, married Ted, and moved to Antonito. She became stepmother to Ted’s three adolescents, and she and Ted had four children together. When I first interviewed her, Janice had been living in Antonito for twenty years and was forty-five years old. She had recently returned to working full-time as a reading specialist at the Guadalupe Elementary School. She was still in the thick of raising her family and recounted vivid descriptions of her pregnancies, infant feeding, meals, cooking, the division of labor in the home, and the changes that ensued as she returned to the workforce. She was thoughtful and articulate, with a playful sense of humor that often led to an infectious chuckle. Monica Taylor, Asuncionita Mondragon, Martha Mondragon, and Cordi Taylor Ornelas are supporting players in this book. Cordi was the eldest sister of José Inez (Joe) Taylor, my husband’s coauthor, and she lived a block from me and across the street from Ramona Valdez. Cordi was born in 1925, the oldest of seven children, in the hamlet of El Rito, Colorado, fifty miles east across the valley from Antonito near the town of San Luis. She had vivid memories of growing up on the family ranch, taking care of the garden, and moving to Antonito at the age of seventeen, after she finished high school. She went to work at the J.C. Penney’s store and helped support her siblings until she married Ernest Ornelas in 1950. Ernest and Cordi had three children. Their son lived in Minnesota, and their daughters lived in Alamosa; each had two sons. After her children grew up, Cordi worked as a church administrator for many years. She had a gentle demeanor, a sweet face, and a soft-spoken voice with a husky laugh. When her health started to fail, she refused all life support measures and died peacefully in her daughter’s home in Alamosa in fall 2004. Monica Taylor was Cordi’s niece and Joe Taylor’s daughter. She was born in 1960. Soon thereafter her mother, Bertha Marquez Taylor, died of kidney disease, and Monica was raised by her maternal grandmother, Amada Marquez. Monica spoke of the family land in Mogote and Lobatos and of the food production and preservation they carried out there. She expressed a strong spiritual connection to and respect for the land. Monica held many jobs, including police officer and waitress. For the

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past several years she had worked as a nurse’s aide in a local hospital. She quit to become a long-distance truck driver with her husband, Kevin, but then decided that life on the road was not for her and went back into health care and then police work. She was articulate, funny, and generous in word and deed. I met seventy-year-old Asuncionita Mondragon at a birthday party for her grandson Anthony and interviewed her twice at my home. She grew up in the ranching hamlet of La Isla, northeast of Antonito near the convergence of the San Antonio and Conejos Rivers. She married her neighbor Fred Mondragon in 1948 and moved with him to the edge of Antonito, where they built a house and operated a small trailer park. Fred had a large ranch, which he worked part-time while working full-time in the perlite mine. Asuncionita raised five children, ran the household, raised chickens, sold eggs, and later worked at the local credit union. She was a cheerful, no-nonsense person who spoke her mind with a smile and opened her home to her children and grandchildren. I interviewed Asuncionita’s youngest child, Martha, twice, and we talked on many more occasions at baseball games, family parties, and her home. Martha was born in Antonito and lived there much of her life, graduating from Antonito high school in 1987. She received a B.A. degree from Adams State College in 1995. In 1989 she married a man from Durango, Mexico, whom she had met at college. They lived for several years in California and had two children. After the marriage fell apart, Martha returned to Antonito with her children to live in a double-wide manufactured home near her parents, unmarried older sister, and married brother. When I interviewed her she was thirty-two and in a relationship that later ended with Joe Taylor Jr., an elected county official. She and Joe had twin girls in 2000, increasing the size of Martha’s family to four children. Martha held several social service jobs but had recently quit her latest job with the county because of poor health. She was a warm and cheerful person who was always smiling, even when she was exhausted by the demands of raising toddler twins and teenagers and coping with stressful health problems. These eight women form the major core of the book. Four others speak briefly: sixty-five-year-old former mayor Carmen Lopez (a pseudonym), eighty-year-old Celina Romero, fifty-two-year-old Bernadette Vigil (a pseudonym), and thirty-four-year-old Yolanda Salazar (a pseudonym). The interviews with the remaining seven women are not quoted here, but they nonetheless contributed to giving my study a broader base.

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The Ethnographic Process I want to end this introductory chapter by citing a conversation I had with Helen Ruybal in 2000, when she was ninety-four years old. Helen was one of the first people I met and the one I interviewed most frequently. She was an enthusiastic participant in the research process, saying once, “The past is interesting if you sit down and listen to people, and you tell something and I tell something and she tells something. It tickled me how here my life has already passed, and when we talk about it, one little thing brings out another one.” Helen’s love of telling stories was manifest in her energetic participation in seventeen interviews between 1996 and 2001. In the following interview excerpt, Helen and I were talking about what I was trying to do with the food-centered life histories I was gathering with her and other women in Antonito. HELEN RUYBAL AND CAROLE COUNIHAN ON ETHNOGRAPHY

Carole: Helen, you know all these interviews we’ve been doing and you know how I type them, type up your words and put them in that book of transcriptions I gave you? If I want to write a book using your words, is that okay with you? Helen: Yes, it will be fine. Carole: Do you want me to use your real name? Helen: Yes, anyway they don’t know me. If I ever did read it, I’d think it’s fun. Carole: Good, I hope so. Well it’s going to take a while for me to— Helen: Chop those things up. Carole: Right. Helen: Those things that are no good; it’s fine when you can throw things away and dig them out—and there’re some things that you cannot throw away and be comfortable. Carole: The good thing about typing them on the computer is that you can take pieces from one interview and put them with pieces in another and then leave out things that don’t fit. Helen: That don’t fit in. I understand that because I know. Carole: I would have to take the interviews and the stories that you’ve told about your life and try to cut and paste and weave them together into a story. Helen: And go through a weaving and then make a story. Carole: Like you used to weave your mats and your rugs, that’s what.

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Helen: It looks like nothing, a pile of yarn, and a pile of strings, and little by little it’s coming to show that it’s going to be something and finally find out, oh, I did do something. Carole: It’s like mining for gold. You might get a pan full of pebbles, and then there’d be some gold nuggets, and that’s the way the interview is. Helen: Yeah. Carole: Sometimes we wander off and talk about gossip or whatever and sometimes you have gold-nugget stories. Helen: [Laughs] Golden nuggets.

Conclusion I have taken the golden nuggets from the interviews and strung them together like beads on a chain of linking commentary to show that the women of Antonito, as Helen put it, “did do something.” Through the medium of food, they experienced a complex world with diverse locations across religion, gender, class, and ethnicity. Chapters 2 and 3 focus on women’s stories of identity, place, land, and water to introduce where they live, who they are, and how they define themselves. Chapters 4, 5, and 6 examine women’s stories of the traditional diet, food work, and cooking to show how they established identity and provided for their families by producing, preserving, and preparing food. Chapters 7, 8, 9, and 10 explore stories about meals, community food sharing, commensal rituals of death, and the community response to hunger to show the important role of giving and receiving food in establishing social relations. Overall, this book seeks to contribute to Latina feminism and feminist ethnography by describing in their own words the place of women in the enduring Mexicano culture of the southern San Luis Valley and by broadening understanding of the complex Latino experience in the United States, an important task given that Latinos will constitute one-fourth of the population by 2050.21 It aims to contribute to Chicano environmentalism by documenting the evolving food culture of one of the driest and coldest regions inhabited by Mexicanos. Finally, by describing women’s food production, preservation, preparation, and consumption, this book aims to foster the Mexicano community’s cultural as well as political citizenship in the United States.

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2

“The Stereotypes Have to Be Broken”

Identity and Ethnicity in Antonito

One of the most striking things I learned from the Hispanic women of Antonito is the diversity of their views. In 2000 Antonito had fewer than 900 inhabitants, and almost 800 of them claimed Hispanic identity on the U.S. Census. Yet in this small and predominantly monoethnic community, women’s stories revealed a notable variety of self-definitions. Different women used different terms to define their ethnic identities, and some changed their preferred terms over the course of their lives in response to changing social forces and political consciousness. They held strong opinions about terms they liked and did not like. They privileged different parts of their heritage—which in many cases encompassed Spanish, Indian, Anglo, and Mexican roots. Even two members of the same family might use different terms and emphasize different aspects of their ancestry; for example, Bernadette Vigil (a pseudonym) called herself “Mexicana,” whereas her sister declared herself “Spanish.” This conflict over ethnic terminology was not unique to my study. Others have noted similar ambiguity in other Mexican American communities (Elsasser, MacKenzie, and Tixier y Vigil 1980; Madrid 1998; Zavella

1991). The lack of consistent terminology pointed to the central dilemma of identification and identity that this chapter explores.

Antonito: An Insider/Outsider Perspective Let me now turn to a description of Antonito by Janice DeHerrera, who grew up in Albuquerque but whose mother was from the Antonito area. Janice had visited off and on all her life until she married and moved to Antonito when she was twenty-six. After nearly twenty years of living there, she had a well-articulated view of the town deriving from her insider/outsider status. JANICE DEHERRERA ON ANTONITO

The first thing I want to describe is Antonito being a small community with a lot of humble people. I would say especially the older people are very humble, unmaterialistic, to the point where they actually hide their riches so that nobody will be jealous of them. Even though there’s a lot of educated people here, for some you wouldn’t even know it. You’d think they were just lowly little housewives who had no education, and then you find out that they’ve got master’s degrees, because they don’t want to stand out, so they make themselves the same. They don’t want to stand out as being arrogant. Everybody goes to bed at the same time, and everybody gets up at the same time, and there’s hardly anybody going against the grain. We all eat the same things at the same time, and we all go to the store and buy the same specials. Sameness is important, sameness is so important. People will hide their riches so that other people won’t bring attention to them, so they don’t stand out as being different. Everybody has the same kind of house. There’s not too many people out there wanting a giant mansion, like 60,000 square feet or 6,000 square feet, they just want something to put their television and their comfy chairs in. The town of Antonito has a lot of little modest homes, with a lot of people living in them. There’s not always a house with a room for each child, or even two children. Sometimes you have a boys’ room and a girls’ room. They all want to wear T-shirts, and they all want to wear jeans. I guess one thing they might show off is their automobiles. This is not a place that changes. Nothing will change, it doesn’t happen overnight. And if there was a change, everybody would be there watching it [laughs]. This place does not change. It’s a constant place, a

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quiet place, a humble place, and one that doesn’t open its doors to outsiders very well. The reason for that is they’ve been burned in the past. This is a predominantly Spanish community. If you don’t show off, and you act kind of like other people, then they are more willing to accept you. Richness is not an important thing around here; as a matter of fact, they don’t care for rich people, and they say nasty things: “Oh, that person’s rich, and they just don’t understand us, because they’re rich.” They’ll ridicule outsiders who are tourists because they perceive them as being people with money coming through here, and they don’t see what they will do to the community by being here. When I talk to outsiders, right away when they find out you’re from Antonito, they have a negative [response], because they don’t know if they like you. We’re not seen as very civilized. They’re afraid of us, and their perception is that this is a lawless place. It was a place to come for dances in the past, and people got into a lot of fights. Even though people fight over here, a lot, and every time you turn around somebody is mad at somebody, or jealous of somebody, they’re not usually violent. They don’t throw bottles at each other. People don’t go around with knives in their pockets, and they don’t go around killing each other. The town is quiet, quiet. So I would say this place is super safe, but I always feel like it’s twenty years behind the times. The climate is super cold in the winter, and not everybody can take it—it’s almost like an Alaska experience. In the wintertime you have hard driving conditions, because it’s icy, and you have to learn how to drive on icy roads, and they don’t even have people that scrape them all the time. So we have to learn to live like that. And we’re high-altitude, and it’s hard on the body to live at a high altitude, but if you’re born here, it’s a little bit easier. If you’re not from here, you have to adjust, and it takes usually a year to adjust to the altitude, the coldness. Almost everybody has to put on [weight], you have to be a little heavier than the average city person or person in a hot climate, because you have to go outside a lot and it’s colder here, so you have to have a little layer of fat to be comfortable. Living at this altitude, and being isolated, is hard for some. But not for all, because some people who are born here and used to this lifestyle, they do well, especially if they haven’t seen anything else. But if you have somebody who maybe went to school somewhere else and sees another part of life, it’s harder for them to come back. You just have a lot more work here. You don’t have conveniences, and you can’t just go to the deli and get something. You have to prepare for the winter and have all your food, in case something should happen,

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because you need to have your stock of beans, your stock of frozen chili, your stock of meat. So everybody stocks, cans and everything, for the winter. I mean it’s not that bad, we’re not that isolated, but that’s the way it is. There’s no stimulation, there’s no stores to go to. For everything you have to travel. So it’s not an easy place to live, especially for women. They expect you to work. With a minimum amount of money, they expect you to live. They don’t believe in luxuries. They don’t believe in fancy clothes or jewelry; men don’t think it’s important; they don’t value it. But a lot of women fix themselves up because that’s how they see themselves, and they don’t want to work so hard. But if you live on a ranch you’re expected to help with the smaller animals. The men take care of the larger animals, and it’s a lot of hard work. Then you’re expected to make things from scratch. If you get hungry and you have a craving, there’s no going down to the little restaurant. We’re so rural that we really don’t even have variety or places to go, like movies. When I was a child, I always saw things I loved about Antonito. I’ve lived all these places all my life, and this is actually home. Even though Albuquerque was my dad’s family’s, in the city, as a child, I never felt community. I complained about that, as a young child, that I wanted to move to the barrio. “Let’s get out of the suburbs. I want to be with my aunt. I want to live close to my aunt.” My dad tells me, “We have a right to live here.” But I’m like, “I want to be with our people.” So finally I am with our people, our people, the family, the community, and you just can’t get community in the city—everybody’s doing their own thing, there’s no community. I just feel really sorry for anybody who hasn’t experienced it, because, even though it has all its drawbacks—everybody can be jealous of you, or mad at your whole family—it’s still a feeling of being a part of community that gets lost in a large city. I guess I had a need for it. Yes, that’s what I was searching for all my life.

Janice underscored many important facets of Antonito culture. It is a community where everyone knows everyone and experiences cooperation and competition, reciprocity and envy, mutual aid and feuds. People value sameness and dislike ostentation, perhaps because of their history of class and ethnic oppression. Although the town is small and quite isolated, people carve out roles, define identity, and relate to each other in many different ways. Important forces determining identity and social position that women experience in complex and intersecting ways are Spanish- or

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English-language use, racial or ethnic ancestry, religious affiliation, class, occupation, experience outside the community, and gender.

Language and Education, Spanish and English An important part of Antonito Mexicano culture has always been the Spanish language, the language of the people, the ancestors, and the home before about 1950, when English increasingly became dominant. For the older study participants, language use was linked to education, for they learned English in school, and the more education they had, the more adept they were in English. Ninety-four-year-old Helen Ruybal told me she was more comfortable speaking English than Spanish, even though when she grew up in the hamlet of Lobatos, she said, “Spanish . . . was the only thing they knew in that small town.” Eighty-one-year-old Ramona Valdez, who grew up on the family ranch in Guadalupe, said, “I didn’t know a word of English when I started school.” However, several of the people I interviewed had ancestors who knew both English and Spanish and could speak, read, and sometimes write both, like Teddy Madrid’s grandparents, Bernadette Vigil’s parents, and Ramona Valdez’s father. People born before 1950, in addition to speaking English fluently, all spoke Spanish well but were less comfortable reading it and even less comfortable writing it. People born after 1950 tended to be native speakers of English and to speak only some Spanish. And most of the town’s youth born after about 1980 knew little or no Spanish. In the past education and class played an important role in family bilingualism, but in the new millennium there is little Spanish in any socioeconomic group. English came to dominance because of several forces: schools, Presbyterian missions, and commerce. Swadesh (1974, 202) claimed that the schools fostered “the repression of the Spanish language and of Hispanic culture,” and my subjects’ experiences confirmed her claim. Most subjects born in the first half of the twentieth century encountered English for the first time when they started school, where its use was mandatory. In school and the business world, English was an asset. Dolores Conlin (a pseudonym), whose father started several stores in northern New Mexico and one in Antonito, said that there was pressure to learn English because “everything was in English.” “So the Spanish,” she continued, “they’d go over to the English because most of the business was in English. It wasn’t in Spanish at all.” But the transition from Spanish to English was

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not easy. Many people recognized that although important, English was the language of outsiders, and it threatened Mexicano culture. TEDDY MADRID ON FREEDOM OF SPEECH

Teddy Madrid had a vivid memory of language conflict in her public elementary school in Las Mesitas in the 1940s, a school where the pupils, teachers, and principal were all Mexicanos. Las Mesitas School was just totally taught in English. They did teach Spanish in high school but not in elementary. They were trying to encourage the children to use English. They had vigilantes—they would have these two little older guys, who just loved putting on these red bands. One experience that I had—I was in first grade. I was outside on the merry-go-round, and I was loud and just boisterous and having a grand old time, and I was speaking Spanish. Here came these two bully kids, and they grabbed me and told me that I was breaking the rule: “You’re not supposed to speak Spanish.” I told them, “There is freedom of speech.” By that time my dad had already taught me two things. First, there is freedom of speech, you can speak any way you want. And second, he said, “If there is not a leader, you be the leader.” He also said, “You are women, you are citizens. You have the right. All these liberties that you have, nobody can quench your creativity or quench your rights.” Then he taught us the rights of others. So they dragged me off to the principal, these two bullies, I call them bullies. I was kicking and said, “There’s freedom of speech! There’s freedom of speech!” They took me to the principal, and the principal said, “You were speaking Spanish? It’s against the rules.” I told him, “My dad told me there is freedom of speech and I can speak Spanish if I want to, out on the playground, I can.” So he let me go. He didn’t do anything. The other kids were just so sad because at last they had caught someone that they could drag to the principal.1

Teddy’s story revealed her respect for the fundamental American values of free speech and due process, as well as her opposition to the imposition of monolingualism. Her account shows that schools were active agents in the suppression of the Spanish language and made Mexicano

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children enforcers of that suppression. It shows what Hispanic children were up against in holding on to their language and helps to explain why Spanish no longer thrives in this region. RAMONA VALDEZ ON ENGLISH AND SPANISH

Eighty-one-year-old Ramona Valdez added to Teddy Madrid’s perspective by highlighting how school, social pressure, shame, and the decline of the Spanish-speaking community worked to promote English and undermine her family’s rich bilingual culture. I think it’s a shame that very few speak Spanish anymore because they could really qualify for good jobs being bilingual. Even in my family, the majority of my great-nieces and great-nephews speak only English. They don’t want to lose their heritage, but in that part they are, because they don’t speak their language. But in other ways they are very loyal to their Hispanic roots. My niece is doing a lot of research on our family history; she traced it to the 1600s. Very few speak Spanish anymore. I myself don’t speak it so good. There’s lots of words I’m used to saying in English, because I have nobody anymore. My father and I used to talk Spanish—although he could talk English real good. Father learned English at [boarding] school in Kansas City. I guess he learned to read in Spanish at his house. He could write both in English and in Spanish and talk in both. I don’t know why I didn’t learn [to read] Spanish with Father. We had several books, and then my father subscribed to several papers. He received the Kansas City Star. Then we’d buy the Denver Post every Sunday, and the local paper, he always received that. He always received another, that was the Pathfinder, and that finally went down. We got that for a long time. That was such a nice one. Then he received La Revista Católica, that was in Spanish. I think he received another one, a Spanish newspaper from Taos, La Voz del Pueblo.2 I learned English when I went to school. I didn’t know any English at all. The first thing that they taught me before I went to school was, “May I be excused?” so that I could go to the bathroom. I didn’t know anything else. I went to school in Alamosa. At that time they had A and B, and I started in B because I didn’t know any English. But for the second grade, they promoted me to A. In the fourth grade they didn’t allow speaking Spanish, they wanted everybody to talk in English. The majority of the Hispanics would learn English. I guess it didn’t matter to me

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because at home I talked Spanish. That’s what I learned first. I was the type that whatever they said, I guess I followed the rules. That was the rules of school. I remember there was an ice-cream man like there is now, only in a buggy. They’d give me a nickel every day and I’d buy an ice-cream cone. All I remember is getting my ice cream and eating it. And he told me one time—see, at school they used to tell us to say, “Yes ma’am”—and he said, “You sabi English?” and I said, “Yes, ma’am”—and he was a man. I have never forgotten that embarrassment. I don’t think the next day I bought ice cream.

Seventy-years after this event, Ramona still remembered her embarrassment at speaking English incorrectly, which was a powerful catalyst to learn it well. She articulated the connection between language and culture by noting the many Spanish-language periodicals her family read when she was young; these periodicals played a key role in sustaining Hispanic culture in the Southwest, and their decline paralleled the imposition of English in the schools and the broader community (Rosales 1997). Ramona underscored how not knowing English placed her in the lower group at school, whereas learning English marked her as smart and enabled her to fit into the increasingly anglicized world. Clearly, English was associated with power, and it affected her and her culture. HELEN RUYBAL ON LEARNING ENGLISH AND BEING SMART

Helen Ruybal expressed themes similar to those of Ramona Valdez. She remembered starting first grade in about 1912. At first I didn’t even know any English. We bought pamphlets—little books, one line in English and one in Spanish and all the little lessons. I tried to use it, like if I said, “I like to play, me gusta jugar, I like to play,” because I was learning to read and that was getting installed in my mind. I would just spend nights reading the pamphlets, and I finally learned to understand English. By the time I went to school, I wasn’t lost. More or less I could read and nobody taught me. When I went to school, kids my age didn’t know a word of English. I used a lot, I knew a lot, and I was already a bookworm. I always wanted books with pictures and what it said under the pictures. My brother knew how to read, and my mother knew a little bit how to read, and my father knew. Then I’d

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get—even a catalog, even a pamphlet that would come by mail, or one of my little books, and I’d get lost. We had an outside toilet, and I’d go there, and I’d sit down and read and read, and “Where is Helen?” My mother said, “She must be in the toilet reading.” I would read, but mostly I was trying to get away from the chores! I’d come back, and my uncle would say that he thought I was smart. My mother and father thought I was smart because I loved books so much and I was learning those English lines without hearing it, and just reading it in those little books. It wasn’t heard at home at all, conversations in English, at that time when I was growing up. My uncle was saying that I was smart, smart, and his wife said, “Yes, she’s smart. She even knows how to get away from chores around the house and lets her sister handle it all.” So when I went to school I already understood English. I couldn’t carry on or talk very well, but all these little things that I had learned would come to my mind, all the “eat” and “play”—I mean the words. At that time the school was in Lobatos. I was one of the smartest ones because I could read English. I don’t think the young people should forget Spanish. If you know two languages, you’re up somewhere. You get asked for certain jobs, and most of them, if you speak both languages, they prefer you for that. That’s another thing with my grandchildren, they don’t use it at all. They speak only English, and if we talk Spanish they have to really pay attention to know what’s going on. I tell them not to forget it. It’s nice, I say, to be able to use both. Because when you grow older, I tell them, you might have a good opportunity, a better opportunity, if you speak both languages. So I make them open their eyes and that’s all. I don’t care how good an English you can use, use the Spanish when you want to or have to, or if you’re just there and something is going on in Spanish, you know what’s going on. You don’t remain blank and ask them what they said.

Helen lamented the loss of Spanish at the same time that she valued English and linked her success in school and her liberation from domestic chores to her early knowledge of it. She understood something that the English-language school system is still coming to terms with—that knowing two languages at an early age conveys a social and educational advantage (see Gándara 2002; Pearson 2002; Zentella 2002). It was not only the public schools that mandated English; so did the Catholic nuns when they took over the Antonito public schools in the 1930s, and the Presbyterian missionaries also had a long-standing commitment to English-language education.

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TEDDY MADRID ON LEARNING ENGLISH FROM THE PRESBYTERIANS

Sixty-six-year-old Teddy Madrid grew up in a bilingual family. Her maternal relatives learned English at the Presbyterian school in Mogote.3 My maternal grandmother had gone to school with Miss Clemens, the missionary from New York or Pennsylvania, who came down here and set up the mission school in Mogote. My grandmother went to school there, and also my great-grandmother. They loved Miss Clemens. Even my mother knew Miss Clemens, although my mother did not go to the mission school. By my mother’s time they had the public school. My mother would take us to the Presbyterian church, and all our Sunday School instructions were in English. But on my dad’s side, my grandmother knew how to write and read Spanish. She hated English. All conversations between adults in our family would be in Spanish.

Ethnic, Gender, and Religious Identity Over the course of the twentieth century, English increasingly prevailed in Antonito through the influence of the school and the Presbyterian church, and it became increasingly common in the public sphere. Spanish use waned, and by 2000 only a few elders spoke Spanish fluently and almost everyone spoke English well, so language was no longer a barrier between Anglos and Hispanics. There were, however, several interlocking forces in Antonito that did create divisions between people: class, gender, religion, and ethnicity. While most people in Antonito identified as Hispanic, there were many ambiguities and differences as well as commonalities in their ethnic consciousness. How they defined and talked about their Hispanic identity varied according to their generation, gender, class, education, and experiences of ethnic diversity and discrimination. Many claimed ancestry back to Spain; many also identified with the historic Hispanic and Native American cultures of northern New Mexico and southern Colorado. While this New Mexican/Spanish/Native American ethnic strain predominated, many people claimed ancestries that included “Anglo,” Irish, French, Jewish, and Swedish. People used many terms to identify themselves: Spanish, Spanish American, Hispanic, Chicano, Mexicano, la gente, and la raza.4 Joe Taylor

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referred to his culture and grandparents as mestizo as well as Chicano (Taylor and Taggart 2003, 81–82) and Reyes Garcia (1988, 1998), an Antonito native, used the term “Indo Hispano” to describe his culture.5 In Antonito many used the terms “Spanish” and “Spanish American,” especially older people.6 When speaking Spanish, some people defined themselves as españoles, but far more common was Mexicanos. In Antonito, “Mexicano” referred to the Hispanic American citizens of Antonito and had a different meaning from the English word “Mexican,” which meant “from Mexico,” an identity most people in Antonito rejected. The terms “Mexican American” and “Latina/o” were rarely used as self-referents in Antonito. My study participants experienced their ethnicity in complex and contrasting ways. They expressed pride in their Hispanic identity and their deep roots in the Upper Rio Grande region while downplaying their Mexican ancestry and emphasizing their Spanish heritage. For example, thirty-two-year-old Martha Mondragon, the youngest woman in my study, said, “I define myself as Hispanic or Spanish, not Mexicano, probably because I grew up knowing that our ancestors came from Spain.” Some study participants made it clear that they wanted to distinguish themselves from recent Mexican immigrants, many of whom were “illegal,” uneducated, poor, and, often, vilified. Yet others sympathized with the plight of Mexican migrants, as Ramona Valdez did. Some people identified themselves as “Chicana/o,” a term that entered the vocabulary in the 1960s and 1970s when Mexican Americans adopted it to indicate a politicized view of their people. Some in Antonito, like Joe Taylor (Taylor and Taggart 2003), used the term with pride; others, like eightyone-year-old Ramona, hated it because, she said, “it sounds like low.” Teddy Madrid spoke of the early 1970s: “I remember hearing that some of the students had started calling themselves Chicanos; they were not Mexicans. What we had known as la gente, la raza, los mexicanos, the Hispanic, you know? All of a sudden, it wasn’t that anymore.” Teddy said that she identified herself as Hispanic or Spanish American on the census. In Spanish she might use mexicanos or hispanos. But what her father used to say was somos raza, and to Teddy it signified that “we knew our roots and we knew where we came from.” Her use of the term raza was not in the more widespread sense of “the Hispanic people,” as in La Raza Unida political party; for her, raza referred to the identity of the settlers who came to the valley in the nineteenth century and who knew each other by their unique spoken Spanish, different from that of Mexican immigrants. The diverse terminology people in Antonito used

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to identity themselves reflected their complex self-depictions; while they shared Hispanic identity, they thought about it very differently. RAMONA VALDEZ ON ETHNIC TERMINOLOGY

I call myself Hispanic and Mexicano, which is not right, but we’re used to saying “Mexicano.” Because mostly we say españoles or Mexicanos. In reality we are Hispanic, but we say Mexicano. Myself, I don’t like “Chicano,” and I don’t think any in my family did, but I can’t remember. I know my brother didn’t. And my sister much less, because she moved to New Mexico. When I’m asked what I am [in English], I say Spanish. What these [health care] providers are used to saying, which I try to break them of, they say, “brown,” “white.” I told them, “Don’t you dare call me white or brown. Call me Hispanic, but don’t call me by colors.” They used to say brown, they’re all brown, and then the Anglos are white, I’m not used to that. It’s just of late that they just started that. Let’s say Chicanos or Mexicanos or gringos, but never by colors. I just don’t like it, I don’t know why. I try not to use it. I don’t like the word “gringo” either. I very seldom use it.7 We’re all so mixed that we can’t say that we’re this or that. When Clinton was running, he said, “We’re all immigrants.” Because there are so many complaining about the Mexicans coming in, or the Guatemalans, to work, and I’m for them because I feel so bad. Every time they catch a truck full of Mexicans and return them back, oh, it hurts me. The only natives are the Indians; we’re all immigrants, we all came from another place. So that’s what I think. When I hear somebody complaining about the Mexicans coming here, I say, “Well, we’re all the same.” If you’re Indian, then you can complain, but otherwise, no. We all came from Spain or from Mexico, but we all came; well, we were born here, but not our ancestors. When I was working [in Santa Fe], this Anglo tells me, “Well, you’re Mexican, because you came from Mexico, your ancestors came.” I said, “I don’t know.” I know part of them came from Spain. I don’t know the rest.

Ramona and many others said that their roots lay in Spain, but they had limited knowledge about their ancestry, a fact that contributed to their complex and conflicted ethnic identity. Helen Ruybal said, “Mucha gente, they want to be español, and they have some relations with old-timers from Spain, and they keep it living, alive.”

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It is likely that the historical discrimination against Mexicans in the United States and the recent anti-immigration fervor worked against a strong identification with Mexico. Furthermore, as Teddy Madrid underscored, people had an intense and positive connection with Spain, probably developed through the romanticization of the Spanish conquest of the New World. TEDDY MADRID ON THE CONNECTION WITH SPAIN

I think that we will never lose that Hispanic, that luster, that thinking of Spain. Even though we know that it’s been years and years. I remember as a child just loving Christopher Columbus and memorizing poems about Christopher Columbus. To me, it didn’t matter where he was from but that he came from Spain and Queen Isabella and giving him ships to sail the ocean blue. I respect that connection, even though I’ve never gone to Spain, I’ve never gone to Mexico. So we’ve never gone back to our roots, wherever they are. My sisters have; two of my sisters have gone back three or four times to Spain. But I think if anything connects us to the Hispanic, it is the language and the culture—so much of the culture and so much of the suffering, and the courage that the Hispanics had to just come to the New World and just conquer it.

Discrimination and Prejudice People wove many strains into their ethnic identity. Like Teddy Madrid, many took pride in their Spanish roots and their Hispanic identity. Because the Antonito area was overwhelmingly Hispanic, my study participants rarely encountered prejudice within their community. But people from Antonito did encounter anti-Mexicano racism when they traveled, its extent varying by gender, generation, class, and exposure. Men seemed to encounter more racism than did women, perhaps because they traveled outside the Hispanic world more, for work and military service. In spite of his Anglo-sounding name, Joe Taylor was fully Chicano, and he endured a great deal of anti-Hispanic racism throughout his life—in the potato fields, perlite mines, and factories of southern Colorado (Taylor and Taggart 2003). In contrast, Ramona Valdez, who until she moved to Santa Fe had rarely traveled beyond Antonito, remembered little discrimination except for one encounter with the segregated wings in the Alamosa hospital in the late 1930s. Although Bernadette Vigil ran into gender discrimination in Antonito, she did not

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experience racial discrimination until she moved east over the Sangre de Cristo Mountains to Pueblo, Colorado, in the 1960s. Teddy Madrid ran into pervasive anti-Mexican stereotypes in Greeley, Colorado, when she was in a Ph.D. program for teachers at the University of Northern Colorado. The women I interviewed lived in predominantly Hispanic environments, both in the family and in the workplace. For example, Helen, a lifelong teacher, said, “In San Rafael we were all Spanish. In Las Mesitas we were nine teachers, and we were all Spanish, and here in San Antonio we were three and only one was English. I never was dismissed because I was Spanish, and I was never hired because I was Spanish, I don’t think.” Several women suggested that because Hispanics were the majority in Antonito, they were somewhat sheltered from prejudice. Nonetheless, some Mexicanos said that local Anglo parents opposed their children’s marriage to Hispanics at the same time that Hispanic parents favored their children’s marriages to Anglos—regardless of their social class. People mentioned several Anglos who came to Antonito with nothing and made a fortune in land and property because local Hispanics welcomed and helped them, even though many Anglos looked down on Mexicanos. Even when they complained about Anglos, Mexicanos focused their distaste on specific greedy or prejudiced people and treated other Anglos cordially. Several people emphasized that they themselves did not discriminate against people of other racial or ethnic groups. For example, Carmen Lopez said, “I think people look at people here. Don’t think that because you’re a gringa, they’re going to be more lovable to you, because they won’t. Do you think that if a colored person comes here, they’re going to be more lovable to them? No. A Spanish person? No.” HELEN RUYBAL ON DISCRIMINATION

When I asked Helen Ruybal if she had had any experience of discrimination, I was wondering if she had suffered it, but she understood the question to mean if she had ever inflicted it. Her answer was revealing because it showed how she felt in the center, not on the periphery, of her culture. No, we didn’t discriminate, we thought everybody had a right to be around. We weren’t discriminating. Even now, we don’t—well, to a little extent we do, like, supposing you were an Anglo and then a Spanish girl would be against you, trying to outdo you in things. Well, if she’s

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a friend of the family or something, you favored her, not because she’s Spanish but just maybe a relative or something. A little discrimination but not hard, not in business. Not in elections. In elections we always vote for whoever we think can do better. But the more you mixed [with Anglos], the better you were; sometimes you mix quite well, and other times you just hate the Anglos, other times you hate the Mexicans, and then you hate the poor, and another one hates the good-looking people, and they don’t want them [laughs].

Helen joked about prejudice and thus tamed it, but she acknowledged it nonetheless. Interethnic mixing was limited, and there were only a few Hispanics in upper-class environments such as Helen’s predominantly Anglo boarding school in the early 1920s.8 She shrugged off having any problems getting along but told me that it was there that she changed her name from Elena to Helen: “I didn’t know what I was doing. I was crazy. I don’t know why I changed it. Changing a Spanish name into English—I didn’t know what I was doing.” Helen perhaps meant that she didn’t realize the full import of anglicizing her name. Perhaps she did it to fit in better at her Anglo school or to “pass” as Anglo. This act probably was a reflection of the extent to which being Anglo conferred higher social status. TEDDY MADRID ON MULTIPLE IDENTITIES AND AXES OF PREJUDICE

Teddy Madrid recognized the complexities of prejudice for people with minority status along axes of gender, race-ethnicity, and religion—what scholars have called “multiple jeopardy” (e.g., King 1988). Teddy and her siblings did not join the majority Catholic religion of their father’s family but rather followed her mother’s religion and became part of the small but long-standing Hispanic Presbyterian community, which placed them outside the mainstream. Teddy encountered some racial prejudice at work and felt that she constantly had to prove herself as a woman, especially after she left her position as a K-12 teacher to become a professor at Adams State College in nearby Alamosa. I think what I felt when I went to Adams State, was, hey, we’re all on the same playing level over here. I was a woman who had proven, I think, what I could do, and here it was I had to prove it all over again.

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This was the kind of thing but it’s sort of natural in a way. I also had to attend state meetings, as an administrator for this small district, where it was again, “You are an administrator?” And little attitudes like that, that I attributed more not to the fact that I was Hispanic, but that I was a woman, and maybe Hispanic. I always said that I was glad that the children, our children, were raised here in Antonito because when they went out, they had no idea what prejudice was. I think prejudice is a very hate-driven thing, and it’s very destructive. My mother’s family were Presbyterians. My great-great-grandfather Jimeo Manzanares was already a Presbyterian when he came and built that little Presbyterian church in Mogote. So my mother, my grandmother, my great-grandmother, and my great-great-grandfather were Presbyterians. On my dad’s side, they made fun because he left the Catholic Church, and he never went back after he married my mother. That was a choice that he made, and my grandmother was very angry. She was very disturbed about that. My aunt, to the day my dad died, she was trying to get him back, paying Masses for him. I am very astute about people’s motives, and I can distinguish between ignorance and prejudice and prejudice that is subtle and different kinds of prejudice. Is it prejudice because I am Hispanic? Prejudice because I am a woman? Prejudice because I’m a Protestant? I’ve experienced that throughout my life in different situations, and I know that I’m pretty tough. Being in a community where it is prominently Roman Catholic and you’re in the minority of being a Presbyterian, I think that you feel somewhat isolated from the community and there are religious differences and things that create sort of a wall, I think, between people. I remember distinctly my sister and me being at a social gathering and this one man turning around and telling us, “You gals are just fine, you’re just super, you’re just great. The only trouble with you is you’re heretics.” He said that. We looked at each other and we thought, “Well, we’re heretics in his eyes, what else is he thinking?” But those kinds of things are subtle, and yet you turn around and he is one of our best friends. But there’s some truth to the saying that what comes out of your mouth is indeed what’s in your heart.

Teddy’s story testified to the complexities of identity and prejudice within the Hispanic community. When she said prejudice against women was “sort of natural in a way,” she emphasized how deep-rooted it was. Fur-

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thermore, she experienced intertwining prejudice—being female, Hispanic, and Presbyterian—which demonstrated that even within her own Hispanic community she was sometimes an outsider. RAMONA VALDEZ ON RELIGIOUS AND ANTI-HISPANIC PREJUDICE

Eighty-one-year-old Ramona Valdez spoke about her experiences of racial-ethnic difference and prejudice, which were complicated by the fact that she looked white and also by the fact that she had a congenital hip disorder (shared by many members of her family), rendering her handicapped physically. She too noted the religious boundaries mentioned by Teddy Madrid. In Alamosa, since I lived there almost year-round, I had lots of friends there. I remember some of the girls were Protestants, and they invited me to their programs, like the Protestants have, the Presbyterians had programs, and the Catholics at that time didn’t have anything for the young. They’d invite me to go with them, and Mother wouldn’t let me. At that time we were raised each religion like separate. Now I know better, but in those days, that’s the way it was. But we were friends. [My hair was] light brown, a very light brown. Mother used to say that it was almost blond, and my brother too. [My parents] were both fair. My mother was white, the Spanish white. My father had blue eyes and was very fair. Lots of times he was mistaken for Anglo. He laughed. I don’t think he resented it; he thought it was funny. I think [being Hispanic] is a good thing. I never found it any bad. But I was thinking when you had asked me that question about prejudice, and then I remembered the Alamosa hospital. That must have been in '38 or '39. I went to the hospital and I remember I was in a wheelchair and these two nurses were in back of me and they were talking. At the hospital they had a section where they put the Spanish and one where they put the Anglos, and they were saying, “Where can we put her? She looks Anglo, yet her name is Valdez.” I felt hurt, and then I didn’t care. Like I said, I always followed the rules. I know I wasn’t friendly to those nurses anymore, nor they to me, because they felt embarrassed, I guess. But those were the rules of the hospital. There was one wing for the Hispanics and the other wing for the Anglos. In school I don’t remember noticing anything [about discrimination]. Of course, maybe I just didn’t notice. I used to hear that in Monte Vista

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[forty miles northwest of Antonito] they were prejudiced, because a lot of people from Mexico and New Mexico came to work in the potatoes, in the fields, and I did hear about the Mexicans not being allowed in some restaurants or some dance halls. I used to hear that at the Minkhaven lodge [on the Conejos River] they didn’t let any Hispanics go to the dances there. But I don’t know, I can’t say, because I never went there. I wasn’t a dancer, but I used to hear that. Because there was this couple, that a Hispanic was married to an Anglo, and they went and they weren’t allowed in. So I don’t know if it’s true, but I believe so, because why would they say such a thing?

BERNADETTE VIGIL ON CHICANO CONSCIOUSNESS

Bernadette Vigil (a pseudonym) had lived in Pueblo, Colorado, as well as Antonito, and she had a well-developed racial-ethnic consciousness. She was a neighbor whom I met soon after coming to Antonito, and I interviewed her twice. Bernadette was born in 1948 into a family of five. She held several secretarial jobs, married and divorced twice, and had one adult daughter who lived in Denver. Food permeated Bernadette’s life and relationships, and I have written about her before (Counihan 2002, 2005). She strongly identified as Mexicana and as Chicana due to having been radicalized politically in the sixties, a time of enormous political ferment and Chicano militancy.9 In my younger years, in the sixties, I was living in Pueblo. I was in that La Raza Unida! There was a bunch of us. We had the posters of Ché and, oh lord have mercy, I can’t believe half the stuff I was involved in. We would go to rallies, and we’d go to the meetings. It was unfair what they were doing with Chicanos, that we were at the lower levels. We were at the lower level of education, we were at the lower level of getting jobs. Every opportunity, if you were not white you did not get it. If you had a Hispanic name they shuffled you to the back. I thought, that’s not fair. So there we were, marching. It was just all classified into what your race was—if you were Chicana or Chicano you still got shafted either way. You got the lowest job, the lowest pay. Antonito was never affected with none of that, like la raza and stuff like that, oh no. Antonito is basically Hispanic—you might feel like an outsider because you [and your family] are almost basically the only white people here, besides Betty Smith. And I never considered Betty anything but Betty. There was never an issue with me about being white

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or not white. But for a lot of people there was. Even with the few white people who were here, they would try to put the Hispanic person in their place. The whites did have better jobs. They were better educated. So they had an advantage. And the Chicanos who did have businesses here—it was because they had a better education. We didn’t show off what we had. We weren’t brought up that way. But some liked to show off what they had. [They called them] lambes. . . . To this day you’ll go, “Eh, a bunch of lambes” [laughs]. You know, like a lick-ass? That’s what they are. Lambes. Like if you want to get ahead and you’re, “Oh, I’ll do it, I’ll do it.” That’s a lambe. Everybody goes, “Eh che lambe.” You can have five hundred Mexicanos in one room. And there’s eight gringos in that room. And these Mexicanos are trying to get ahead. The other Mexicanos will pull you down. They will not let you get ahead. I can’t figure out why. Instead of boosting your own raza to go ahead, get up there, make the best you can. If I can’t do it maybe you can. Oh no, its like, “If I can’t, you can’t, and tough luck. We’re all going to scrape the bottom of the barrel together.” TEDDY MADRID ON IDENTITY, TERMINOLOGY, AND PREJUDICE

Bernadette Vigil pointed out one of the problems of institutionalized inequality (Lorde 1984): the racism and prejudice of the broader society filtered down to those on the bottom of the socioeconomic scale, and they internalized the negative feelings about their group and pushed themselves down. Teddy Madrid described how some Anglo teachers perpetuated those negative attitudes and how important it was for Mexicanos to define their own identity. I think there is a confusion, and that’s why I say we need to come to terms with the terminology. I myself think that for us who have been here for hundreds of years that the terms “Mexicano,” “Hispano,” could identify us, because we have been far removed from Mexico. Far removed from so many things, even the language. So that in part we have lost our language, and we have lost a lot of our culture. [In English I use] “Hispanic.” [In Spanish] I would probably say “Mexicana.” I used to use the term “Spanish American” years ago. I hadn’t become that aware of all the dialogue that was going on, about the Hispanic and particularly the culture that exists in northern New Mexico and southern Colorado. I don’t think that I was aware then. I have told you before

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that I took this class when I was about twenty-two years old, and that was my first formal introduction to the history of the Southwest per se. Then when I went to the University of Northern Colorado [in Greeley] and I had enrolled in the doctoral program there, I took a class on the culturally disadvantaged. As part of the requirement of the class each one of us had to choose a group of people that you identified in the United States as culturally disadvantaged. Some of them did it on the blacks, black Americans; some of them did it on the southern Appalachians; and I did mine on the Mexican Americans. It was a very large class. I remember starting the presentation by writing the words “Mexican-American” and “No Mexican Hyphenated American.” And then I wrote it “Mexican American” without the hyphen. I told them my presentation was going to be on the Mexican American. I erased the Mexican American hyphenated, I erased it. I talked about how the United States came in and took over New Mexico. I mentioned the prejudice that existed toward Mexican Americans. The class was horrible, horrible. They just hated everything I was saying. Oh yes. One lady walked out because she asked me this question—she said, “Do you hate Anglo teachers?” I told her, “I should say not.” I told her, “I have had Anglo teachers in college. That was the first time I’ve ever had Anglos. But,” I said, “I do not hate Anglo teachers.” She said, “You think Anglo teachers are no good.” It angered me, and I told her, “Let me put it this way, some of the best teachers that I ever had were Anglo.” Because it was true. I had wonderful teachers that freshman year that I went to Western State. But I told her, by the same token, some of the worst had been Anglo. It was just that she angered me. She was a teacher. There were other teachers there who were proposing that the Mexican Americans whom they had had were so ignorant, that they had such little potential that they should be guided into technical fields only, and vocational. I told her absolutely not, some of the Mexican Americans I know are doctors and lawyers and teachers and so on. They were angry at me. They were oh so angry at me. The professor had to come to my defense and tell them, “You have to let her finish giving her presentation.” So anyway I did my whole presentation on the Mexican American. I told them, “As teachers you are not looking at the potential of these students. You are not aware that the student you want to guide into a vocational program could very well become your next doctor. Or become

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your next lawyer or teacher or even just become a very self-fulfilled, literate, functioning person.” It was a difficult place, a very difficult place. These were teachers, they were from all over the state, and maybe even from out of state. They were taking higher-level classes, and it astounded me how ignorant they were. This was 1972. But that has brought me to the conclusion that the terminology we use to identify people has to be settled in the minds of people. They have to know. Like, to me, Chicano does not identify anything. No, it doesn’t. To me, Chicano is more like a shortening of a word that was used to identify themselves when they were struggling for recognition of their rights. Maybe the only way that people can be recognized is to identify themselves in a different way. But I don’t see why you have to not have a dignified way of being identified. [People don’t use “Mexican American” because] I think a lot of it is a shame type of thing being associated with a migrant, with immigrants. I think that would be the only reason why. I don’t really know what is right. I myself prefer to call myself Hispanic, but then in Spanish mexicana. When I do a presentation I just do not like the hyphenated Mexican American. Especially when that Mexican American blood has been shed in almost every war that the United States has fought. Well, I think Sarah Deutsch [1987] in her book says so much about the stereotypes people hold about the Mexican Americans—how the women are sloppy. That is not true. And then about the men—they are dirty and lazy and don’t want to work. That is not true. Where they might be quiet and noncompetitive and very polite, that doesn’t mean they are submissive. They may be very polite because they were taught to be that way. Very often if you don’t find them very dressed up it’s because probably most of their work is manual. The stereotypes have to be broken, those have to be broken because it’s hindering to people. It’s belittling to people to give them those stereotypes.

Conclusion The women of Antonito held complex views about their ethnic identities that were greatly affected by the worlds they inhabited. Inside Antonito they were relatively safe from discrimination, but outside their majority Hispanic environment they encountered prejudice that aimed to hinder them. Their narratives revealed their language struggles—the need to know English in order to succeed in the United States but regret over the loss of Spanish and the rich culture in which it was embedded.

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They described their multiple axes of identity—ethnicity, religion, and education—and showed how these determined their social position. Yet their accounts also showed how the available terminology has failed them: there is no definitive term that all can subscribe to and unify around. A common identification may be essential to cultural citizenship (Flores and Benmayor 1997, 12), which includes not only political rights but also “human, social and cultural rights.” Cultural citizenship also depends on Mexicanos’ ability to “claim space in society” (1997, 15). Their struggle to remain grounded in their land and place is the focus of the next chapter.

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3

“Part of This World”

Meanings of Land and Water

The natural environment had rich significance for Antonito Mexicanos. As Peña (1998b, 11) has written, “Place . . . is a primary repository for human constructions of meaning and identity.” In the rural area surrounding Antonito, cultivated fields, vast expanses of wild llano, nearby mesas, distant mountains, and especially watercourses formed significant parts of people’s environment and held many meanings. The land was a place of both belonging and exclusion. It was a site of birth, death, home, family, and ancestors, yet also a reminder of dispossession and the struggle to survive.1 It was a spiritually renewing locus of beautiful sights, smells, and sounds, yet also, during the cold winters, severe droughts, and violent winds, a place of challenges and hardship. Land, like water, was a resource, commodity, producer of wealth, and source of food and life. Some people held spiritual beliefs about land and water, seeing them as a common good to be shared and conserved; others saw them as commodities to be exploited. In the Antonito area, dramatic landforms marked the four cardinal directions. To the south, the ancient volcano, San Antonio Mountain,

rose like a huge upside-down bowl fringed with dark trees. To the east, the low-lying, tawny, flat-topped Piñon Hills commanded the foreground and behind them soared the jagged Sangre de Cristo Mountains topped by saw-toothed Culebra Peak. To the north, Mount Blanca dominated the San Luis Valley. To the west, the beloved triple-toothed Mogote Peaks overlooked the beautiful Conejos River valley. To the east and west of Antonito, fertile riparian corridors lined the rivers where the early Hispanic settlers established hamlets, in places like Los Sauces where the Conejos River met the Rio Grande, and La Isla where the San Antonio and Conejos Rivers joined. Farther from water the llano, the dry sagebrush plain, stretched for miles east of Antonito from the San Antonio River to the Rio Grande. Much greener due to the heavier winter snow and summer rains were the nearby San Juan Mountains to the west of town, accessible by road up the Conejos River canyon past San Rafael, Mogote, Las Mesitas, and Fox Creek, rising to the passes at La Manga (10,232 ft.) and Cumbres (10,080 ft.) and then down into the Chama River valley of New Mexico. People lived in small nucleated settlements or scattered dwellings near rivers or irrigation ditches. Although Antonito itself was founded in a rocky, arid spot as a railroad town, many of the people who settled there came from and had continuing roots in the agropastoral hamlets along the rivers. These shared many characteristics of Hispanic villages throughout the siete condados, in particular with the Rio Arriba and Tewa Basins of nearby northern New Mexico: small size, nucleated settlement, a Catholic church (and occasionally a Protestant one too), an agropastoral economy, and common lands for hunting, gathering, fishing, and grazing.2 Many people in Antonito mentioned their roots in and affinity for New Mexico. Janice, for example, said, “New Mexico calls to me a lot. I keep saying it’s the light, and it’s also a feeling. There’s a feeling of the terrain.” The Antonito area was an important part of the rural Chicano homeland. As Gonzales (1999, 131) remarked, as late as the 1920s most Mexicanos lived in rural areas, and these have been vastly understudied.

History of Land: Acquisition and Loss The principal way Hispanics acquired land in the Southwest was through land grants (Gonzales 2003; Martínez 1987). To foster settlement in the northern territories, Spain (1500s–1821) and Mexico (1821–1848) issued land grants to settlers, who established communal villages that

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were the heart of Hispanic social and economic organization. The area around Antonito fell under the 1832 Conejos/Guadalupe Grant, one of the earliest Mexican grants in Colorado, given to four men—José Martínez, Antonio Martínez, Julian Gallegos, and Seledon Valdez (study participant Ramona Valdez’s great-grandfather)—who came from nearby Rio Arriba and Taos Counties in New Mexico and established settlements along the San Antonio and Conejos Rivers.3 Land grant settlers had to cultivate the land continuously, hold water and pastures in common, and build fortified villages for protection from Indians.4 In many areas settlers took advantage of the natural biodiversity by using a riparian long-lot system that extended from the rivers across the lowlands and up into the mountains, providing access to diverse mini-ecosystems and their products (Carlson 1967; Peña 2005, 79–81).5 But Hispanic landownership was soon threatened. After the MexicanAmerican War (1846–1848), the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ceded almost half Mexico’s territory, including the San Luis Valley, to the United States. Although Article IX of the treaty promised to respect Mexicanos’ land claims, they lost vast amounts of their land through invalidation of land grants, land grabs by outsiders, unpaid taxes, homesteading, debts to mercantile capitalists and lawyers, government sale to the railroads, and government seizure for national forests (Gonzales 2003).6 In 1900 the Court of Private Land Claims invalidated the Conejos Land Grant and many Mexicanos were dispossessed, including Ramona Valdez’s family, who lost the land that they had inherited from Ramona’s maternal great-grandfather, Seledon Valdez. Ramona said of her grandfather, “He lost everything, from what I hear, trying to get a hold of the grant, paying lawyers, and paying this and that, and he lost all his wealth.” With the denial of Hispanic claims to the thousands of acres comprising the Conejos Land Grant, it became public domain and was “open for settlement under the Homestead Act” of 1862–1935 (Stoller 1982, xxiv), from which Teddy Madrid’s ancestors were among the relatively few Hispanics to benefit.7 She explained, “Although my family had lived in Mogote since 1848, my great-grandfather obtained a deed under this [Homestead] Act.” Naomi Mestas, Ramona Valdez’s ninety-three-year-old cousin, also remembered homesteading land with her husband, Salomon Mestas, soon after they married. Their land was near Pot Mountain or Cerro de la Olla, south of Antonito, in what she called “that isolated llano place,” with no water until her husband dug a well, which was “quite a treasure.” Naomi Mestas underscored the difficulties of homesteading

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and the scarcity of water, which partly explained why far fewer Hispanics gained land through the Homestead Act than lost it through various means. The arrival of the railroads spurred the transformation from an agropastoral land-based economy to a capitalist one, which increased competition for land and cutthroat business dealings that contributed to Mexicano land loss. After she read Jaramillo’s Romance of a Little Village Girl, Teddy Madrid said that her maternal grandfather lost his land just like Jaramillo’s family did. After mortgaging his sheep to the entrepreneur Warshauer, Teddy’s grandfather took her grandmother on a fine honeymoon, bought her a beautiful brooch, and built a grand twostory house in Las Mesitas. But he ended up losing everything because he could not pay off his loans. The day they took his sheep he became ill, and he died soon thereafter, at only thirty years of age. Peña (1998b, 6) argued that capitalism and Mexicano land loss in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century undermined the “ecologically sustainable livelihoods” that were typical of the Mexicano mode of production in the region.8 As they lost land and the ability to survive from farming and sheepherding, Hispanics increasingly turned to seasonal wage labor for the railroads, the beet fields of northern Colorado, and the coal mines in Utah and southern Colorado while maintaining family ties in the villages (Deutsch 1987). For example, Anna Garcia said her father emigrated to Utah to work in the coal mines after losing his two hundred acres on the Alamosa River above Capulin, twenty miles northwest of Antonito, because of debts to a speculator named W. A. (Bill) Braiden who took their land, their house, their cattle, their ewes—everything.9 Some Mexicanos responded to land loss by forming resistance movements to promote Hispanic solidarity and attack symbols of Anglo encroachment—especially railroads.10 In Antonito, Hispanics organized around Penitente organizations, religious brotherhoods (cofradías) inspired by Franciscan monks that developed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century and built simple rural chapels called moradas in several communities that were centers of religious and political organization (Weigle 1976). Antonito Hispanics also founded the Sociedad Protección Mutua de Trabajadores Unidos (SPMDTU; Mutual Protection Society of United Workers), whose goals were to protect Hispanics against discrimination and to provide life insurance (Sanchez 1971).11 In the 1960s, just southwest of Antonito in Rio Arriba County, the Chicano activist Reies López Tijerina focused on restoring to the original grantees the Tierra Amarilla Land Grant, 600,000 acres of which had

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Sociedad Protección Mutua de Trabajadores Unidos (SPMDTU) building on Main Street, Antonito.

been awarded by the courts to Thomas Catron in 1883. Tijerina founded the Alianza Federal de las Mercedes (Federal Alliance of Land Grants) and held demonstrations in national forest lands to draw attention to Chicano land claims. But he was ultimately jailed, and the movement failed.12 People in Antonito were involved in this land grant struggle. For example, one of Ramona Valdez’s nieces was actively involved in the movement, and another niece’s husband was Rio Arriba County sheriff during the demonstrations. HELEN RUYBAL’S LAND ACQUISITION AND SALE

Although many Mexicanas/os lost land and never got it back, others acquired substantial property in the valley and up the Conejos River canyon. Helen Ruybal and her husband, Carlos, amassed a sizable fortune in land, beginning after her parents died and they bought her siblings’ shares of the inheritance. Later they bought more land and acquired Carlos’s father’s sheep and Bureau of Land Management (BLM) grazing rights land.13 Helen gave a detailed description of the processes of acquiring land starting in the 1950s and then selling it after Carlos died in 1984. Our inheritance land from my side—we were four of us, so they divided the sixty acres into four places, 1, 2, 3, 4, numbered. My younger brother said he didn’t want to cut hay, he didn’t want to rent to people to irrigate, he didn’t want to check on the ditch gates, so he asked us to

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buy his. So we bought it right away. It wasn’t even a year afterward that my big brother sold us his. And then my sister and her husband. Then we ended up keeping it all, all four pieces. Later my father-in-law wanted to sell his BLM land.14 He got his family together and told them that he was going to sell and it was up to them if they wanted to buy the sheep and the range up there in the mountains. All of them wanted to buy it according to whatever they could give down and to pay him over time. He said he was too old to wait for payments. If anybody could buy it all, he would sell it. But, he said, “If nobody could buy it all, I’ll sell it to an outsider.” All of them wanted it, almost all of them anyway, all the boys. My father-in-law gave them time to decide, because he wanted to sell at the time of the high range closing; it closed at a certain time of the year. So finally one said he would buy it, he had the money, he would buy it. Then Carlos said, “I will buy it too.” My brother-in-law said to Carlos, “How are you going to buy it when you don’t even have a house, you don’t even have any income except your work?” The other guy was a small farmer. He had a farm, but he wasn’t Superman. They were all doubting, his four brothers, they said, “He cannot get that much.” It was a lot of money because it was a big, big area, the high range. Carlos and I, we went to the bank and the bank said maybe we could get Alvin Miller [a pseudonym] because he had a lot of money and maybe he could share the loan. So we came to him. He said, “Forget about the bank. I’ll back you up with the money that you need until you clear up.” My father-in-law, old as he was, he still was the boss. He still wanted what he wanted. So, anyway, the next Saturday when they had a meeting, Carlos came with a contract ready to sign for that amount of money. His brothers just looked. They didn’t argue much; well, they did say funny words, like, “You think you’re better than us. You just think you have a better way of living than we have.” Carlos said, “Well, I don’t have a better living, I’m just going to try to make a better living.” So Carlos bought the sheep and the BLM mountain land rights. Then the rest of his father’s land was divided. My father-in-law gave some land to all the children. They gave the first eighty that belongs to my son, Ben, now; they gave it to Amarante, eighty acres. Then the next eighty acres, they gave it to Margaret. And so on. It was a lot of land, and he divided it. He didn’t take us at our word or anything. He had a lawyer.

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So all my mother’s land, and father’s, and Carlos’s father’s became ours until we sold out. I didn’t want to, and yet I knew that I wanted to, because it was too much to leave, we had many acres. We thought we’d sell it. But we didn’t sell it. We wanted to and didn’t want to, and we thought, well, we have grandchildren, and we have to make arrangements for everything, and maybe we had better sell it and have money to give them. Finally I told my son, Ben, “Let’s sell if we can sell to one person and get paid today and forget that we ever had anything and stay home. I don’t want to be collecting, I don’t want to be making drafts, I don’t want to be going after people to pay.” I said, “I want the money and forget.” Whenever I was sad, I didn’t want to repent, I didn’t want to go back on the job because Ben wasn’t a farmer. He’s a good worker, but he didn’t grow up farming.

Helen hinted at an emotional attachment to the land, but recognized that land without a farmer was not a good match. She described the process of acquiring land, through inheritance and purchase, and their critical loan from Alvin Miller, a wealthy Anglo. Many parents both gave and sold land to their children, as Carlos’s did, and many siblings experienced conflict over land. Land was an important and valuable commodity, particularly when the ranching economy was thriving. But even as times changed and ranching became less viable, land remained precious because of its multilayered significance.

Land and Its Meanings The meanings of land in Antonito were complex, deep, and important. Land was associated with family history, because it was birthplace, home, and final resting place. People tried to hold on to their land, and some of those who lost it in one generation reacquired it in another. Almost all the women in Antonito I interviewed owned or had owned land either by themselves or jointly with their husbands, which gave them, as Deutsch argued, “a degree of independence, an ability to act on their own” (1987, 15). Parents often worked out decisions about land inheritance before they died, sometimes having the children pay for their desired plot beforehand. People believed that if they had to sell land, it was preferable to sell to family members or at least to locals, yet they sometimes sold to the highest bidder, whether insider or not. Attitudes toward land as a commodity flourished alongside beliefs in the land as a source of beauty and spirituality.

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MONICA TAYLOR’S DREAM OF LAND, FAMILY, AND PLACE

Forty-year-old Monica Taylor revealed the meaning of land in a dream she had just before her “brother” Joe died. Joe was actually her uncle, her mother’s youngest brother, but he was close to her in age. After her mother died when she was an infant, Monica spent a lot of time with Joe and his brothers, Ernest and Tony. In her dream Monica traveled across the family land, a site of birth, food production, commensality, and death. Oh, I need to tell you something. I don’t know if Dad told you that my oldest, well, adopted brother, uncle, whatever, had passed away, Joe Marquez. He died on New Year’s Eve. He had been real sick for quite a while. But the really strange part was—this was the day before Christmas Eve—I had a dream about him. I dreamed that I was in Mogote near where Grandpa’s homestead was, Grandpa Marquez. I had this dream that Joe, the brother who was dying, had come to me, in our bedroom, and he said, “H’ita,” he said, “I’m lost, will you take me home?” In my dream I was wearing this long white camisole nightgown. I took Joe by the hand, and he was wearing everyday street clothes, and he looked like he did right before he died. I dreamed that we had gone by these mountains, we were walking. It was probably three or four o’clock in the morning, because you could tell the sun was just barely starting to come up. We went by this house, and this river, and this grove of trees, which was actually out in Lobatos or La Isla, where I was raised. I said, “No, we’re not stopping here.” Something told me we had to keep walking. I still had his hand, and we were still walking, and we came by these mountains, and I thought, “No, this isn’t it.” Then we came across this other river and this other grove of trees, and I said, “OK, this is where we need to go.” And we went down into Mogote. There is this little grove of trees down by the river, and I kept seeing all this mist, and in my dream it’s summertime, midsummer. Everything’s really warm, and believe it or not, we had no wind. So as I’m walking, this mist, a lot of mist, is coming toward me, and I thought, “This is strange,” and the person walking toward me is my mother, and she’s carrying this bouquet of flowers that she’s tied with a yellow ribbon, and she says, “Monica, this is for you because it’s Christmas Day.”

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Joe and I are still walking, and I can see my grandmother—my grandmother is walking toward me. My grandmother and my mom’s sister Gloria were setting a picnic table, and it had a checkered type of tablecloth, and in the dream my brother Joe that passed away and Tony and Ernest had gone fishing and they were walking toward me, and I could smell the smoke, like a campfire smoke, and I could see Tony and Joe, and Ernest, walking up with a big old bunch of fish that they had caught. They had them on some sticks, long poles like they used to put fish on. Reuben and Jim were building a campfire, and my aunt Cecilia, Ernest’s wife, was walking toward the table with this big old birthday cake. My grandfather was saddling horses. He was saddling this old horse that we called Old Smokey, who was a white buckskin. I could smell the wood smoke, I could smell the fish frying, I could smell potatoes frying, and it was just amazing. My grandmother came up to me, and she said, “Are you ready to eat lunch? It’s time for lunch.” The sun was coming up, there was no breeze, it was warm, it was unbelievable. I told my aunt Cecilia, “What is the cake for?” She said, “Today is Christmas Day, it’s Jesus’s birthday.” Of course, that’s why she made a birthday cake. But in my dream my grandmother is coming toward me. I still have Joe by the hand. But I noticed when I turned around—every few minutes I turned around and looked at Joe—he was getting younger and younger and younger. They all were. Eventually, for just like the split seconds that I was there, everybody looked like they did when they were in their twenties and thirties, except for my grandparents, they looked like they were in their sixties. The boys were all in their jeans, the jean jackets, the blue jeans, their flannel shirts, things they wore when they were younger. So, anyway, Grandma comes up to Joe, and she says, “Come on, you guys, it’s time for lunch.” My mother is walking toward me, and she has this bouquet of flowers, and all of a sudden I start seeing things fade, and she’s trying to hand me this bouquet of flowers, and she says, “I picked these for you, Monica, because it’s Christmas Day.” In my dream I let go of Joe’s hand because Grandma has him, and they’re walking toward this mist again, and all of a sudden all you see is this big mist, and you can still see the sun filtering through the trees. Joe died the next day.

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Monica Taylor in front of the giant willow at Coleman’s ranch.

MONICA TAYLOR’S PERCEPTIONS OF THE LAND

Monica Taylor’s vivid dream made clear associations between land, family, and food. She walked in the dream across the land, tracing her family’s roots until she reached a picnic spot populated by her extended family. She showed the links between commensality and family by describing the fish caught in the river, the smells of wood smoke and potatoes frying, the birthday cake for Jesus, and the set table. Her dream described a common scene in Antonito—a large extended family group having a feast out in the countryside. After telling me her dream, Monica went on to talk more explicitly about her family’s history in diverse places in the valley and about how the land was the basis of her religious practice grounded in Celtic and Native American spirituality. The dream was pretty cool. It was a perfect setting because Joe went back to where he was born. I think all the kids were born out there, in Mogote, the whole family was. Then they moved to Sanford for a little bit, and then they moved to Lobatos. The dream, when it starts out we’re in Los Sauces,15 because we’re going by mountainsides, which I’m assuming was coming up from Los Sauces, and then we end up by the [San Antonio] river in Lobatos, but that’s not where we’re supposed to

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stop. We go on to Mogote, to the Conejos River. My grandparents built their house out there in Mogote. The family started out there. I remember going. Tony had property out there, so I used to go out with him and help him irrigate. My mother is buried out there, and my grandparents are buried out there, Antonio Abad Marquez and Amada Gomez Marquez. Last summer we rode the [Cumbres & Toltec] train, and I actually got to go right by my great-grandmother’s homestead in Osier. My great-grandmother, Amada’s mother, Juanita Ortega de Gomez, built a homestead out there. There is also a place up on La Manga Pass that I like to go and sit. What I like is the fact that there are trees—it’s an undeveloped area. I like the fact that you can sit there and think, “Gee, God created all this.” When I stop and think about it—for me, spirituality is not going to a church, a building with four walls. To me, spirituality is going to the mountains, finding a pond, a waterfall, a grove, a meadow with flowers, anything that is serene, anything that is calming to the spiritual essence. I’ve kind of gotten into a little bit of Celtic folklore now. I still do the Native American ritual. I read something every day that makes me think about the land, makes me think about the air, the mountains. I have really gotten into the Celtic lore, because it talks about the land. It talks about guardianship of the land, how you should take care of the land. It talks about appreciation for the wind, the air, the sun, but most especially the earth. What I like about the Native American sequence is that they talk about how Mother Earth should be taken care of. You shouldn’t go in and just destroy the land and just tear things up. If you’re going to take away from the land, you have to give back to it; there’s just no getting around that. Because our earthly resources are slowly—or quickly, I guess I should say—they’re diminishing. That kind of goes back to my great-grandparents, my grandparents, they all had big gardens. Everybody believed in planting trees, putting things that are productive back into the ground. I like to plant things. My grandmother did it, all of my relatives. I grew up around gardens. I learned a lot of respect for the land. My grandmother, even when we moved into the low-income housing [in town], she was always planting flowers. I think had she been able to, she would have put in a huge garden. She was always telling me, “Always use your resources.” A friend of mine who is a Native American chief says, “Your lifeline is blood, your lifeline is the earth, the water that flows through the earth is blood.” You always have to have that rebirth in the land. Farm-

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Ramona Valdez in her kitchen.

ing is farming as long as you’re giving back. Life is a rebirth in one form or another. Just remember that people in life, locally, come from the land. Everything goes back to the land.

RAMONA VALDEZ ON THE MEANINGS OF LAND

Forty-year-old Monica Taylor built a contemporary spiritual and moral philosophy around respecting, conserving, and renewing the land. Eighty-one-year-old Ramona Valdez’s attachment to the land was less spiritual than Monica’s; nonetheless, she too valued it for its beauty and its associations with her family’s history. As stated earlier, Ramona’s mother’s grandfather was one of the original Conejos land grantees but lost the land in a court fight and debts to lawyers. Ramona grew up in the 1920s and 1930s on her father’s 180-acre ranch just north of the Conejos River and east of the hamlet of Guadalupe with her parents, older brother, Crescenzio, and older sister, Elena. My father’s land had been his father’s land. I don’t know if that was homesteaded or what, it probably was. Father had, let’s see, 80 and 40, that’s 120 acres, and then he bought 60 more, and that’s what he had. That’s a beautiful place. I haven’t been there for a long time. I just went once after my brother died. That was very depressing. But it’s a beautiful place. From the house you could see the view. You can’t see the river anymore because it’s gotten full of trees and willows and everything. All the land in between [my father’s parcels] was my aunt’s and mi

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Grande’s [my grandmother’s]. But when they sold, they sold it to Alvin Miller, they didn’t sell it to father because Miller paid more. Yes, [there were some hard feelings], not too much, but still, since my father had taken care of all their business all that time, you would have thought that they would have sold it to him, but it was a younger generation. Mi Grande, I’m sure she would have sold it to him, but she was gone—and money talks. My sister, Elena, and I sold [our land] to [our brother] Crescenzio, so it would stay in the family. Usually it was a man who inherited more. Crescenzio inherited more than I did. And I did more than Elena. Father had already made his will long before it was settled. That’s the way it was. The 80 would go to Crescenzio, and the 60 to me, and the 40 to Elena, the 40 acres. My part, and my sister’s part, we sold it to Crescenzio. Miller would have given us more, but we didn’t sell it to him, so we left it in the family. Oh yes. It was supposed to be in the family, I thought, and so did my sister. To my father, land meant a lot, and so did it to my brother, and I’m sure it does a lot to my nephew Demetrio, because they’re ranchers. Now, to others in the family, I don’t know. But they do love the land, and I’m sure they’ll keep it. They want it to be in the family, like a summer home for the family to come to. I don’t think anybody is willing to sell now, but who knows about the next generation? Land is very valuable. People who have it really are happy about it, and they don’t want to get rid of it unless they absolutely have to. Because it’s always land to borrow money on. It’s a good thing to have, lots of land. Land stands for tradition—and wealth. Land is wealth. When you have land, I think men feel that they have something, and so do women. They feel that they’re part of this world. TEDDY MADRID ON LAND, HOME, AND FAMILY

Teddy Madrid described the multilayered associations of land with home, childhood, and family. At the end of her story she described land that she and her siblings had loved and visited as children and that had once been part of the land grant but had passed out of Hispanic hands into the U.S. Rio Grande National Forest (RGNF). You think about the land, and how we feel about it. We go back and say, “This was my dad’s home, my grandfather’s home, my great-grandfather’s home, my great-great-grandfather’s home,” and it’s home.

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Teddy Madrid in front of her natal home in Las Mesitas.

One day I asked my dad, “Where’s God’s little acre?” We had been reading Steinbeck. He said, “Right here, right here.” It just means so much, the land, and the place, and it’s like a feeling of home, and it’s somehow intermixed with the soul, I think, of the family. It’s like when the family gets together, we have these reunions, there’s the dynamic there that everybody feels. I can’t describe it as anything other than belongingness, a soul. It’s difficult to explain, when everything is exploding all around you, and all of a sudden people are saying “global” and you’re saying, “regionalism.” You’re saying “home,” or you’re saying “individualism.” To me, if we lose it, we’ll be losing the individual spirit I think was started here, how many years ago, I don’t know. That’s the way I think about this place—it’s home, and it’s meaning to life. It’s food, for the spirit. The Mogotes, the Mogote area, the river, the clear blue sky, I like that, and I like San Rafael. I like that drive going to Tres Piedras and on to Ojo Caliente, and the mountains. I love that whole area of southern Colorado and northern New Mexico—I go into Santa Fe, I go into New Mexico, and I feel like I’m at home, or here. To me, it is just so beautiful, this is home. I just think it’s wonderful. It is home, and I don’t know that people will ever get rid of that feeling.

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There are changes in the air that you can see. There is building up [the Conejos River canyon] to the west of us, beautiful buildings, and it’s changing. I can see that it is going to change. My sisters and I had a sort of strange experience, it must have been this past summer. The areas that we used to go to were Aspen Glade, Elk Creek, the Pinnacles, Spectacle Lake, San Miguel, and all those areas that I’ve told you that we would cover when we were young. Well, my sisters went up to Aspen Glade, and they said they just went for a ride, and no sooner had they gotten there than this old campground host comes up and tells them, “If you stay, it’ll cost”—I can’t remember how much. They said to me, “There was no way that we could explain it to him, because he was a stranger from somewhere who had been planted there. He couldn’t understand that we were just reminiscing, we weren’t going to park there.” Really truly I think they felt, who are the insiders, and who are the outsiders? And they felt very strongly that if you knew history, you would know that you are the outsider.

Teddy highlighted some important facts about Mexicanas’ relationship to the land in the Antonito area—the struggle to hold on to it and its association with family, with spirituality, with home, and with history. Her last comment underscored the problematic nature of “history” by pointing out that what was known by Mexicano insiders was very different from what was promoted by RGNF policy. Formed by President Theodore Roosevelt in 1908 from parts of the former Conejos Land Grant, the RGNF extends from the San Juan Mountains in the west across the San Luis Valley to include some of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains in the east.16 A portion of the RGNF starts just a few miles from where Teddy grew up in Las Mesitas, and it included Aspen Glade, a place traditionally frequented by local Hispanics. The RGNF made it into an official campground that charges visitors $14 a day for any stay of more than thirty minutes, regardless of their status as local residents, their past use of the area, or their purpose.17

Water in the Southwest Aspen Glade is one of the few remaining “public” access points to the Conejos River, and even there one could not park without paying a fee. Privatization of water is a threat because all over the Southwest water has always been precious, essential, and sparse. In the Western Climate Center’s records for Manassa, Colorado, seven miles from Antonito, the

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average rainfall for the period 1948–2005 was a mere 7.57 inches per year, with a low of just under 4 inches and a high of just over 12 inches.18 Because there is so little rainfall, plant and animal life depend on the rivers formed by melting snow from the San Juan Mountains. As Rivera (1998, xvii) wrote, “In the upper Rio Grande bioregion . . . watercourses and their tributaries stand apart as the most defining features critical to all forms of life, biotic and human.” The early Hispanic settlers in southern Colorado followed the practices typical of the siete condados and built acequias—earthen ditches that channeled snow melt from rivers through a gravity-flow system to irrigate fields and gardens. The earliest Colorado acequia was the San Luis People’s Ditch, established in 1851, and it was soon followed by ditches in the Antonito area (Hicks and Peña 2003; Hildner 2007). Recent studies of acequias have documented their three centuries in the Upper Rio Grande and their unique ecological and social characteristics.19 Acequias have been an effective system of water conservation and habitat renewal.20 They have roots in Moorish, Spanish, and Pueblo Indian communities and are a thriving example of a “common-property regime” based on conserving and sharing water for the common good (Rivera 1998, xix). Associations of water shareholders manage the ditches, clean debris and plants, maintain the headgates that regulate water flow, collect dues, and apportion water—which can be a challenging and discordant process in dry years.21 Teddy Madrid remembered water fights during her childhood in the 1930s and 1940s. My dad was working away from home, so when he would come home he wanted to get his share of the water. There were always three or four other ranchers, and they were also Hispanic, who were ready to fight with a shovel. There were a couple of deaths, not my father and not in Mogote, but I know that there were fights over the water between the people. So they knew how precious the water was.

Acequia law has increasingly clashed with U.S. water law, based on “the doctrine of prior appropriation,” which defines water “as a commodity that is for sale to the highest bidder” (Peña and Martinez 1998, 159). In Colorado, water law is subject to the Colorado Doctrine, or the Firstin-Time, First-in-Right Doctrine of Prior Appropriation, which gives priority water rights to the earliest claimants and allows that “water rights may be purchased and sold like any other property” (SLVDRG

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2002, F-3). This law has undermined the acequia system, but acequias are still a vital part of the regional ecology. More than a thousand still function in New Mexico, more than a hundred in Colorado (Hicks and Peña 2003, 39 n. 13). Peña and Mondragon-Valdéz (1998, 320–321) contest accusations in the literature that Hispano acequia farming wastes water and hurts the environment.22 Peña (1998d) argues that acequias are wasteful only if nature is judged solely in terms of what it does for humans. But from a holistic ecological perspective, acequias are not wasteful because they create biodiverse habitats. They follow the natural contours of the land and foster wildlife, wetlands, plant diversity, soil conservation, and aquifer recharge.23 They contrast with the center-pivot irrigation systems that increasingly prevail in the San Luis Valley, watering “about 50% of the Valley’s 600,000 irrigated acres” in 2002 (SLVDRG 2002, F-4). Peña (1998d, 261) criticizes these modern irrigation systems because they rely on fossil fuels, lose sprayed water to evaporation, and promote monocropping and concomitant soil exhaustion. In the traditional Mexicano subsistence economy, water was the most important resource and was unseverable from the land. But increasingly water has become a commodity that can be sold away from the land it passes through. This commodification of water threatens the traditional mixed ranching and farming economy. There were two attempts in the last quarter of the twentieth century—by American Water Development Inc. in the 1980s and Stockman’s water company in the 1990s—to grab vast quantities of San Luis Valley water and sell it to Denver and other Colorado cities.24 In both cases San Luis valley politicians, ranchers, and farmers—large and small, Hispanic and Anglo—joined to fight the sale of their water, knowing full well how critical it is and how much they had already lost in the Rio Grande River compact of 1938.25

The Multiple Meanings and Uses of Water Water was embedded in Mexicanos’ worldview and social relationships. In the old days, children learned to value work and conservation by being responsible for hauling water. Most people in Antonito had a deep reverence for water, used it carefully, and recognized its economic value. Many linked their water conservation ethos to their morality, spirituality, and ancestry. The Native American cultures that inhabited the region before the Mexicanos—the Tewa, Tiwa, Ute, and Keres—revered water, “treasuring it as the virtual lifeblood of the community” (Rivera 1998,

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xvii). Many of the women I interviewed in Antonito shared this reverence for water. Asuncionita Mondragon said: Oh, I wish I could take you one of these days to where I was born. You could see the river from our place, it was so full. You could see the water shining when the sun was coming up. You could see that water so shiny on that mesa, because it was flooded. It was so full. And you could even hear it from our place because it used to go through our land, the Conejos River. In the mornings it was so full. It was so heavy with water that you could acutely hear the water running in the river. It was beautiful then. There was so much water.

TEDDY MADRID ON THE TRADITIONAL USES OF WATER

Sixty-six-year-old Teddy Madrid grew up in the 1930s and 1940s in Las Mesitas, near both sets of grandparents and a stone’s throw from the Conejos River. She had a lifelong awareness that water is life-giving, scarce, and valuable. She described its multiple uses and meanings in her family and her fears about its commodification and loss. My parents taught by their example that water was so precious, that it was a gift from the Divine power, and that we needed to conserve this water. When they were irrigating the crops, they were so careful. The Hispanic men, the people who came, they developed the ditch system. As a child, I was very much aware of the ditches and the use of water to irrigate small gardens or large areas of land to plant whatever they could plant. They could get the water just from that ditch, they could get the water flowing. They knew exactly how to irrigate and the force of gravity to get the water going to the different areas. I also remember that my mother used the water of the ditches. She had a strawberry patch and a garden, a large garden plot. We would make sure that when the water came down, we would set it and water all our plants. So water was very important. As a child, I knew that, and as I grew older, that thought never left me—how precious the water of the San Luis Valley was, how precious it was to the settlers, and how precious it has become. The thing that impresses me about the past is that my step-grandfather and my uncle, my mother’s half brother, they were giants. They were six-foot-five, six-foot-seven. And in the fall after the first frost, when the river froze, we would walk across my grandfather’s land to

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the river, and I watched this operation every winter. Along the river they would dig a little bit of a trench, and they’d fill it up with sawdust. Then they would go to the river, and the chunks of ice were so thick. They’d break up the ice in big chunks, and they’d carry it to the sawdust and cover it, pack it down in long stretches of ice, along the river. So in the summer we had ice. All we would do, if mother needed a piece of ice, we’d get a bucket and go up and dig the sawdust and bring the ice. We would chip it off somehow or other. I always thought that I was so strong, as small as I am. I thought, “Oh, I’m the oldest. I’ve got to be so strong.” We didn’t have electricity, but my father bought an old icebox—oh, it was the day when my dad brought this icebox. It had a container where we could pack the ice. So my mother for the first time could keep food refrigerated. We’d run down there and get the ice so we had the ice for the icebox. That was just so wonderful for us. Then the other thing, my aunt would get the ice, and they would make ice cream for us. So we had that in the summertime. In the summer, from June the 24th, it really helped my mother and the rest of the family because we all learned to swim. What happened was we did a lot of work in the fields, but the minute that we were back at four o’clock, my mother had a towel and soap, and we’d run to the river that was just yards away, the Conejos River, and it was cold. She wouldn’t let us go in before June the 24th. That was the date of San Juan, el día de San Juan they would call it. Then all summer long, she didn’t have to worry about the bathing, because we were in the clear waters of the Conejos River. That became a fun time too, and we saved that much on hauling water during the summer months. We also learned to swim, except two, maybe two of my sisters who didn’t like the water. But the rest of us liked to get in that cold water. It was so cold. We would get in there. We’d sit in the water like sitting ducks, I’d say we’d have to be there about five to ten minutes. Then, when your body became acclimated to the temperature of the water, we’d just swim and wash and shampoo our hair. We didn’t have shampoo, but my mother would make her own soap. The Conejos River was just a lifesaver for us. We just loved that. In the fall, my mother would get all her blankets and all her mattresses and all the wool, and everything, and we’d go down to the ditch and we would use the running ditch water to wash all her bedding. So we did that every, every summer and have it ready for the winter. The river was so important. My dad fished; it was not unusual for my dad to

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go out early in the morning, walk to the Conejos River, and come back with enough fish to feed the whole family. This was almost like a daily thing. And so the river was very central to our lives. My dad had a very good well, and this well had to be cleaned, every winter, and it never went dry. It was a good well. It was about forty feet deep. And every winter my dad would go down into the well and really clean it out, because that was when the water was the lowest. And dig out the sand and the gravel. So my dad, through all his actions, knew how precious the water was. It was my job, mine and my sister’s mostly, to carry the water for my mother because for a long time we did not have running water. My dad made sure that we had the water ready for my mom—for her cooking and for her dishwashing and for baking, et cetera. My dad got milk cans, those great big milk cans, and we’d bring the water in for my mother and for my grandmother. And for a little lady that used to rent from my grandmother, we’d carry the water for her, too. So we knew there was no substitute for water, and we knew how precious water was. We were not to waste a glass of water. You drink it because some day there will be no water. We carried buckets. When we were smaller, of course, we had to carry them, one in each hand if you were strong, or just one, and it would hit you on your calf, because you were too small. We’d fill up Mother’s pans and her tub, and we’d fill up the fifteen-gallon milk can. We would also carry water for Mom’s flowers—she always loved flowers and we’d carry that because the plants needed the water, too, not just us. So that’s what we did. It was one of the chores that was assigned to us, but we never questioned my dad. My dad went away to work, and his instructions were: you bring in the wood, you break up the coal and bring it in, and you carry the water. That was the main thing—bring the water! We didn’t question. I remember distinctly carrying two pails in my arms to my grandmother. I was a daydreamer. I think that I never looked at it as a bad chore because it gave me time to myself, and I let my thoughts sort of materialize and wander. I remember one time the water was for my grandmother and I went an extra few twenty yards, maybe, to our house with the pails and I woke up from my dreams, and I turned back and I thought, “Oh, I wasted all that energy!” Then I thought, “I better be more alert and take care of my business.” We had those chores with water, and so we knew water was precious.

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In Teddy’s narrative water was precious, and what was paramount was its use value, not its exchange value. Teddy feared, however, that water was increasingly becoming a valuable commodity and that the Hispanic community had to struggle to maintain control of the water in the face of that commodification. TEDDY MADRID ON WATER AS A COMMODITY

Times have really changed. Water is now big business, and people are fighting for the water. Up in Mogote, the neighbors have plenty of water shares, and they have been using their water from the water shares to run their sprinklers [the center-pivot irrigation systems]. That’s the way they water the big fields. Then we see the big development that the other neighbors have on the south side of San Rafael, and I don’t know exactly how many acres, but one of my sisters, being more knowledgeable about the land, she said, “That seems to me like two or three sections of land that’s been developed.”26 Now, they may have dug a well, but they’re using the shares of ditch water to run the sprinklers. They’ve dug their ditches—usually they’re three feet—these are some five to six feet, and those ditches are really running. This neighbor told me how he was raised, the grandfather would tell them, “You are not to waste one drop of water.” And he was one of the first ones in Conejos County to put in one of the sprinkler systems. I remember when he put it up, it was so foreign. I remember he said, “This is the trend of the future, and I’m going to set up a sprinkler system.” And he did. I think now he has two or three or four, but he was one of the first ones who started the sprinkler systems. In a sense, this has created another war and resentment between the people who are the first rights owners of the water and the ones who have the sprinkler systems.27 They don’t know how to control their use of the water. They say, “I have so much water, why not use it?” But I say that resources are precious, and I think they should be saved. So water has become property. It’s property. People with money have been able to buy lots of shares that did not really belong to them originally. So the Hispanics have lost the fight on water rights. Somehow or other the Platoro dam, they keep the water up there, and they release it just to meet the demands of the state to New Mexico and Texas, and so on.28 So a lot of the water rights have been, I think, lost because there was nobody to watch out for the little guy.

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I’m not that knowledgeable. I’m not speaking from knowledge. I’m speaking from just the observations of a citizen, of a citizen of the world, a citizen of the Valley. I am just saying what I feel. I feel that the first settlers who came here and created their irrigation canals from the rivers, and they had the first rights and the ground rights. I think they should be considered first of all, in everything else. Don’t consider me an expert. It’s just from how I feel about the water of the San Luis Valley. I don’t want to see the water, all the water, go to the cities, nor do I want it to go to big ranchers, all of it. I think there should be adequate provision for the little towns like Antonito. I hope that our water would not be endangered, the water rights of the people in Antonito and Conejos County. So the water was so, so important, and I think that we all grew up with that thought, that idea of the water. When I went away to college [in 1951], I had been impacted so much by the importance of water. I was only seventeen years old, but I remember writing a story for my English professor. I called it “The Clouds Hang Low over Mogote.” It was about strangers coming in and taking over some of the water rights and the ditches and the problems that would exist for our people if, when, this happened. I just don’t know why I wrote it, but I think I wrote it sort of visionary, like I knew. I think I felt how precious the water was and that there would be an attempt, a water grab. Even now, I see the cities. I see the cities, the Front Range,29 I see them coming for the water, I really do. I think it’s going to happen. I think people are ready to sell. Oh, I think the importance of water can’t be overestimated. It can’t be, you can’t even begin to compare it with other things. I think water is like a treasure here in the San Luis Valley, and I think we’ve known about it for all our lives. We’ve known how precious water is and how important it is to our lives. Having lived in this semiarid desert, we always knew that water was precious, and we always knew we had water, but we always knew that we had to conserve it.

Although she defined herself as “not an expert,” Teddy Madrid made clear that she knew a great deal about water’s value, its necessity to her culture, and the dangers of its increasing commodification. But in spite of the widespread recognition of water’s value and scarcity, not everyone adhered to the conservation ethos, which increasingly clashed with a definition of water as a commodity that could be bought, sold, and used for individual benefit regardless of the community impact.

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JANICE DEHERRERA ON WATER AS A COMMODITY

Janice DeHerrera described water issues in the drought years of the early twenty-first century. On water, I know somebody at work had these beautiful flowers, and she said something like, “I’m not going to let my garden die just because we’re having a drought. I paid for the water, so what can they tell me?” I said, “But we’re having a drought. You have to be conservative.” So you know this person has a small little yard, and they’re using eighty dollars’ worth, and they’re not conserving at all, and you’re just appalled at not having really any kind of conservation. You couldn’t even logically explain to that person that the whole community is going through a difficult time, and you have to conserve the water, and you can’t waste it. She said, “They can’t tell me anything, I paid for it.” [She and her husband] leave the water on all they can during the times they can. We’re having a drought, and there’s a lot of fights over water. We even have to fight for our land, for our water. I know people who last year had to dig two or three wells, and they couldn’t find water on their land. I know people who had to come in and wash their clothes at the Laundromat with town water, because they didn’t have enough water to wash clothes, and they didn’t even have enough water to take baths. I was putting a timer on all of us—we were taking five-minute showers for a long time. You have to be conservative. We have to teach our children. Even now, even when I drink glasses of water, I put [any left] in the plants. I don’t put it down the drain. I don’t brush my teeth anymore without turning off the faucet; I don’t let it run. When I do loads of clothes, I make sure that I have a full washing machine. To conserve.

MONICA TAYLOR ON WATER AS LIFE

Janice DeHerrera was extremely sensitive to the communal need to safeguard water but pointed to a neighbor who felt no qualms about using as much as she could. Contradictory views of water coexisted in Antonito, running the gamut from reverence to conservation to exploitation for profit. Earlier, I quoted Monica Taylor on the spiritual importance of the land; here she speaks of the spiritual and survival importance of water. Her view was concordant with a Rio Arriba region dicho reported by Peña (2005, 164): “sin agua no hay vida, without water there is no life.”

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I can remember Great-Uncle Diego, and he always used to say the same thing, “Water is the earth.” His thing was that if you don’t have water, you have no growth in anything. It might go back to the Native American type of possible ancestry, but, I mean, a lot of people I know— pioneers, farmers—everybody has this thing about needing water. My great-uncle Diego and I, since we shared the same birthday, I would go out in the summertime and help him in his garden in Guadalupe. My great-aunt, his wife, had a huge—I mean huge—pea garden. I bet you it was at least a quarter of an acre of just peas, peas alone. Their garden was two full acres. They had twenty-some kids. I can remember as a kid going out to help Uncle Diego, and he used to tell me, “This is how we water.” You can only water the potatoes for a certain amount of time and then kind of let the ground dry out. Then the corn, of course, you had to water every day. There was always something different—flowers, potatoes, squash. Grandma always used to say, “If you don’t have water, you don’t have life.” Grandma had a cistern and caught rainwater off the roof. Grandma was a firm believer in rainwater—it was cleaner supposedly. Antonito is kind of funny. It would rain on one side of the house and not on the other. I used to always think, “Wow, how strange.” Grandma used to say in Spanish, agua de mal y bien, which in English means “water of good and bad.” I used to think, “OK, water of good and bad, what does that mean?” Evidently her grandmother, I guess, used to use the phrase because if it rained on one side of the house that was good, but unfortunately it never rained on the other side of the house where the garden was. So that’s where they came up with agua de mal y bien. Every time Grandma saw a rainbow she used to call it the wishing rainbow, hoping that it would rain all the way around. I remember she would give us cups of water and say, “Don’t waste it, don’t throw it.” If you threw it you didn’t get water until the next day. So you learned real quick not to waste water. I remember we moved into town, and she never let us take a bath with more than an inch or two of water in the tub. When you stop and think about it, she didn’t waste; there was no waste. As a kid, I can remember watching my uncles trying to irrigate. It was quite an issue sometimes—just getting everything ready, getting the irrigation pumps in, the little tarps, the headgates. They would set up a tarp system, one of the boys would. Of course, that was back in the days when we had water. You couldn’t even dream about doing that today.

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Back then we had plenty of water, and so what they would do is they set up the tarps through the fields, and they would block so much off so that Grandma could have water for her garden. My grandmother had a garden in Lobatos. Her garden was not a small garden. She probably planted, I would say, pretty much about a quarter of an acre. She was pretty intelligent. She set up her own little tarp section there to water the garden. So we would sit out there, me and my cousin Glory Ann, and we would move the little tarp from area to area, and then Grandma would have a little embankment, and she’d make like a little ditch around it. Well, that was the other thing. OK, when my grandfather died, my mother died, they were buried out in Mogote, and I can remember as a kid we used to have to go to the ditch to get buckets of water because Grandma had transplanted some irises. She put a bunch around my mother’s grave. She had a bunch on Grandpa’s grave. It was a big deal. We used to carry a five-gallon bucket. That was something we did all summer long because it was so dry out there, so desolate. But thank God for the ditch being right next to the church. I can remember as a kid going out there, and anybody else who had flowers, Saturdays or maybe Sunday afternoon, that’s what you did. You went out there, and you watered those irises. I can remember for a time [we bathed in the river]. In the summertime we would. There was a little area by the bosque there. The only bad thing about that was there were tons of mosquitoes and flies. They would about eat you to death out there. But Grandma had this little grove of trees that was toward the edge of the bosque. She dug a little pond, and it was clean water. In the summertime we would go out, and she would wash my hair. I remember we used to make these huge bars of soap. I can remember sitting in there, going, “This is a drag, I’ve got to take a bath.” But after a while I would think, “This isn’t too bad.” Because that one little area was warm. The sun would hit the water. They would have to drag you kicking and screaming, but once you got in there it wasn’t that bad. Actually, that’s where I got my appreciation for water. Today we have no water here. In fact, the other day I was really kind of sick because they were showing on TV how water from the Rio Grande is going to Texas and how they get tons of water all the time, and I’m thinking, yeah, you guys get your water, but we don’t, we don’t even really have the water to send. That’s upsetting to me. I’m worried about drought. I’m really worried, and I just hope that we don’t end up

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like Oklahoma in the thirties with the dust bowl. I’m worried about the fact that people in the Denver area don’t consider the San Luis Valley part of Colorado—I’m worried about them messing up the aquifers. I’m worried about the fact that we don’t have a lot of snow. It seems to be less and less, and more wind. That’s a heavy concern for me. Our rains are far and few between. For local farming, being on the small scale or big scale, I think a lot of farmers are going to have to change what type of crops they can grow, because I don’t think the water is going to be here. I think that we’re going through serious changes. I think Mother Earth is—places that were used to flourishing because we had sunshine, we had water, we had good fertile land. I really hope we don’t lose that, because I have grave concerns that the San Luis Valley might some day turn into a dust bowl. That worries me, having been raised here, born here, you don’t want to see that. We don’t have any water, and I’m really concerned that local wells might run dry. Farmers are just not even going to have water for the inside of their house. I keep praying for snow, I keep thinking maybe I can get a lot of people together and do a snow dance. I worry about the land because there’s no snow. Things are changing, and I don’t like that. I don’t want to see the San Luis Valley turn into a dust bowl, and that’s a real possibility.

Conclusion: Land, Water, Place, and Chicano Cultural Ecology Although men were the primary managers of water—digging wells, running the acequia associations, setting the tarps, and staffing the water boards—women had rich attachments to it. They did not play a major role in the formal adjudication of water rights or in the ditch associations (Teddy Madrid said, “I’ve never heard of a woman being a leader”). But women did have a deep awareness of the importance of water to Mexicano farming, ranching, and culture.30 They knew how to employ the ditch water to irrigate the kitchen gardens and maximize food production during the short summer growing season. They were wary of power grabs for the water and distressed about recent droughts, which threatened not only short-term agriculture and domestic water use but also the long-term viability of San Luis Valley communities. Survival of the upper Rio Grande Mexicano culture depended on access to land and water. As Teddy Madrid said, “If we don’t have

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these, we die.” This was demonstrated by the Mexicanos who formed the Ganados del Valle cooperative in the northern New Mexico town of Los Ojos. After years of struggle they gained access to sufficient land to support forty families on a sheep-raising and weaving business (Pulido 1998).31 But for many Antonito Mexicanos, holding on to the land after one hundred fifty years of incursions has been a struggle. In addition, recent housing developments on the Conejos River have transferred more precious acres to outsiders, limited Mexicanos’ access to the river, and threatened the river’s purity. But in Antonito people still try to keep land in local hands. They recognize and demonstrate what Flores and Benmayor (1997, 16) pointed out about U.S. Latinos in general: “The struggle for the right to control space and to establish community is a central one.” In their memories of land and water, the women of Antonito spoke about their past, their traditions, and their home. They established a “dwelling place,” which Basso (1996, 106), following Heidegger, defined as a place that humans inhabit and invest with meaning. They asserted their claims to space and contributed to Chicano environmentalism, which aims to demonstrate Chicano roots in the land, to promote cultural and biological diversity, and to construct “sustainable alternatives to rampant capitalist maldevelopment” (Peña 1998a, 15). In the chapters that follow, the women talk in great detail about the traditional food production system, which was dependent on access to land and water, and about how their culture was interwoven with that food system and landscape.

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4

“Anything You Want Is Going to Come from the Earth”

The Traditional Diet

The Locally Produced Subsistence Diet The older women of Antonito remembered a time when food production tied them to land and water. Monica Taylor encapsulated the traditional San Luis Valley food system when she cited her grandmother’s words: “Anything you want is going to come from the earth.” This chapter provides a historical overview of what came from the earth in Antonito and the surrounding agricultural hamlets from the 1930s to the recent past. Mexicanas’ food-centered life histories revealed close connections to the environment and deep roots in San Luis Valley places slowly weakening but enduring into the twenty-first century. In Antonito the climate is particularly harsh because of the high altitude, scarce rainfall, high winds, and bitter winter cold. A short but intense summer growing season (90–120 days) is characterized by constant sun, and, with luck, the monsoon rains of July and August bestow one-third of the annual precipitation on average.1 In the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, a family with access to land and water and with local knowl-

edge about gardening and preserving food could produce enough to sustain itself for the entire year. People were as frugal and careful to conserve food as they were water. As Teddy Madrid put it, “Nothing was wasted, nothing.”2 Several studies have described northern New Mexico Hispanic foodways,3 but few have documented those in the considerably colder climate and higher altitude of the San Luis Valley.4 The description of the Antonito diet, principal foods, and healing plants presented here relies on the words of the older women in my study who still remembered the times when growing, preserving, and cooking food occupied a great deal of their time, skill, and work. To set the stage, I begin with Ramona Valdez’s narrative about growing up on the banks of the Conejos River. She was born in 1919, the third child of José Demetrio and Nepomosena Valdez. Ramona grew up on her father’s land, a 180-acre ranch in the fertile floodplain on the north bank of the Conejos River just east of the hamlet of Guadalupe. Ramona’s older siblings, Crescenzio (Cres) and Elena, got married, but Ramona remained single and lived with her parents on the ranch from 1919 through the early 1950s. After her mother died, she moved with her father to a house in town, and Cres took over the ranch. After her father died, Ramona moved to Santa Fe and worked at a dry cleaning establishment for several years. RAMONA VALDEZ’S FOOD NARRATIVE

Ramona Valdez had rich memories of her family’s food production and consumption in the first half of the twentieth century. I asked her to describe the typical foods of the San Luis Valley. We had meat and always potatoes and beans. The three things, and maybe sometimes not beans but a vegetable. Sometimes rice and split peas. Lots of stews with the potatoes and the carrots and the turnips and the rotabagas. Father liked the stew—mother did, too, but he liked it more. Meat and cabbage and onions. That was something they used a lot because the cabbage would last a long time in the winter. Just keep it from freezing. Mother tried to always have a vegetable, even if it was dry. String beans or verdolagas [purslane], and the wild spinach, there was always some. And then the calabacitas [small green pumpkins]. When Mother was at the ranch, she used to dry a lot of the calabacitas. [She would] cube them when they were tender, tender, and

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then dice them real thin and put them in the sun and cover them with cheesecloth and then let them dry. We had an old screen door that we put [outside], and the calabacitas would air from under and then the cheesecloth on top, and they would dry soon. Then we cooked them just like in the summer. Soak them, and then cook them with corn and fried onions and green chili—chopped fresh green chili—and fried all together it’s the best food there is. And then a pot of beans, oh gosh, that’s a meal in itself. We did dry the green beans, string beans. Put them on a string and hang them outside on the clothesline. We are all meat lovers. And potato lovers. Mother would mix together potatoes and meat, fry them together. Or beans and meat, always some type of meat. Either it was mixed up in stews or with beans or with potatoes. We ate roasts and fried [meat]. And the ribs, they were so good, especially the fatty ones that I can’t eat anymore. The lamb, spring fed, and then the pork. Oh, father usually kept about fifty head of cattle and not too many sheep, maybe twenty-five. And pigs, ten, twelve, sometimes just two, sometimes more.5 He always butchered some. When they put a pig to fatten in August, they put a little one for competition—because, like “pigs,” they’ll try to get the food away from the other, so they’ll eat more and get fatter soon. Then the little one would be the next one to be fattened. And then another little one for it. Then for Christmas they’d kill it, in December, and make empanaditas and the whole works—grind the meat and sweeten it to taste, and add raisins, and sometimes nowadays they add nuts. I don’t think Mother did, but sometimes she would add piñon. Then make the little tortillas and turn them over and fry them in deep fat. They’re delicious. We ate mostly mutton and pork. Pork was mostly what we had to eat. It was smaller and easier to dry. I just liked it better, too. We always had a lot of pigs. Enough to sell and to use. I know one time I raised shoats,6 I don’t know how many they were. I made $80 for that. They weren’t full grown. They’d sell pigs at least twice a year, I think, never more than twenty, with what we ate and what they sold, because it takes a lot of grain to feed them. A pig breeds twice a year, so you could always have young pigs. But the ones that fattened, they fattened for two or three months. They were really fat, their stomachs would be on the ground. I don’t remember how much lard we’d get from one pig. We used lard for everything. We never had to buy that. We rendered it so it was good. It was cooked enough to where it wouldn’t spoil. It lasted until the next time they butchered.7 Oh, and the head cheese—that’s from the pork’s head. You soak it in salt until it cleans completely, and

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then you cook it and then take the meat off and then chop some queritos—that’s the pork skins—and mix it all together and then press it. We used to press it between two boards with lots of heavy stuff. Let’s see if I remember what year it was, it must have been in ’39, that summer, Father had a lot of lambs, so every week he’d butcher one for Daniel’s market. We’d keep the inside, which we’d make into menudo [tripe soup] and morcillas [blood sausages] and the blood pudding. My father used to love to roast the head of the lamb, and I’d spoon the brains out from the back of the head and put it on bread. Then I’d clean the panza [stomach] and cut it in pieces and can it, because mother was the only one who ate it, and menudo [tripe], so I’d can it in half pints for her. Mother would make a big dish—she’d chop up the heart and the kidneys and part of the liver and fry it and then pour the blood, seasoned with salt and pepper and oregano—that was delicious. The blood gets crumbly. But it would be cooked and very tasty. The oregano makes it very tasty. Then we had the burriñates, the smaller intestines are cleaned and then the fat ones, then you roll the thinner intestines around them and then roast them. They were delicious. Some people would think they’re gross, but when you’re raised with those, you like them. Then in the summer lots of times when they butchered, we had to dry the meat since we didn’t have any refrigerator. We used to dry it in sesinas [strips] on the clothesline. That’s what we liked the most. We made [jerky] out of everything, of mutton, of beef, all the meat, everything, since we didn’t have a refrigerator, we dried everything. We’d slice it and hang it on the clothesline, and I’d stay there watching for the flies and so the magpies wouldn’t steal it, because they would. Mother would soak the meat in chili—that way the flies don’t get to it—or a lot of pepper. But that was mostly the pork. The lamb or mutton, that was just in salt and that stayed there till it dried. We’d hang it every day and then bring it in at night. About two or three days was good enough to store. Then she had another way of preserving pork that was delicious. She’d have a big crock, a big olla, about two or three gallons big. And we’d melt the lard there and then fry the ribs and all the pieces of meat and store them in that. Then when you took them out to eat—they were just like fresh.8 Then we had lots of chickens, we always had enough eggs, we even sold eggs, or butter. We had a box that had twelve dozen crates of twelve dozens. Father would bring it to the store. I used to sell butter. And cheese. We’d put milk in a pan and let the cream go up and take it

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off and make that into butter and then make the rest into cheese. Then chop it up, break it up into pieces, and then put it molded into coffee cans. [We would] usually sell it right away to people who wanted it; it didn’t age too much because we didn’t have a refrigerator.9 People would say they wanted a cheese, and I’d save one for them. And the butter the same. Never more than three or four rounds. Sometimes I delivered it, to Guadalupe or Conejos. At that time those cheeses were fifty cents. And now a cheese like that is $4.50. There was always something fresh from the garden. Father grew almost everything. We raised all our beans, and it wasn’t pinto beans; it was bolita beans that he raised. Sometimes he let people from Guadalupe go halfers, give them an acre and they’d plant beans, and at harvest half would be for them and half for us. So we had all our food. The only thing we bought was sugar and flour. And sometimes not even flour. There was a mill, in San Rafael, I think. They’d take a sack of grain and bring coarse flour, which is now called bran. They called it semita. Then the finer grind, the white flour. We grew wheat, yes, and barley. We grew barley, wheat, and peas—for tasol. Father used to cut all those together for feed for the cows.10 It would dry, and it was good food. Father grew everything. His favorite was pumpkins. Oh, he loved pumpkin pie. He loved pumpkin just baked and then criss-crossed to take out the tough part, and then with lots of sugar on top, or brown sugar, and just eat it like that. He raised a lot of squash. We’d eat squashes when they were young, when they were tender, and then let them be ripe. They called them calabacitas; they weren’t zucchinis. Later on we found the seeds of zucchinis, but they weren’t as tasty as the old. We raised carrots. Lots of onions—we had onions year-round, and turnips, and rotabagas, that was his favorite, and cabbage. We had lots of garlic. Huge rows like that—strong and good. People from New Mexico always used to come in October and sell everything. My mother loved chilis. She always liked green chili, which we peeled. Father would buy lots of apples, and in those days, we used to always have a lot of apple butter. Mother used to can peaches and pears and plums. Everything. Then in the forties, in the war, there was rationing. We didn’t have sugar, but we had lots of honey. Father would rent the land for the bees, so they would pay him with honey. We usually had oatmeal in the morning. Father loved oatmeal. Me— once I got to where I did what I wanted, I drank cocoa and ate a slice of fresh bread with butter. That was my breakfast. I used to bake bread twice a week. We ate a lot of bread, yeast bread, with white flour. In

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later years I made rolls, but at the beginning it was loaves. In a big pan, we just put them together. Four and four, maybe eight, in that pan, and they browned real nice, and once they were cooked, I put lard on top of them. Coat them with lard and put them again in the oven so they get dark brown. They tasted real good. The crust would be soft. I did it early in the morning so it finished cooking by the evening because it has to rise two or three times. It’s real tasty when it’s well baked. We ate flour tortillas. We weren’t accustomed to the corn tortillas until later on. My father didn’t like tortillas. Mother did. So when Mother couldn’t make them anymore, I did. I had already learned how to do all that, so when it was my turn to do it, I would do it. I didn’t think anything of it. I like dobladitos—to spread the tortilla about this big [gesturing with her hands] and then fold it. It’s yeast bread. It tastes so different that way. I don’t know why. I call them dobladitos, because they’re folded. And then if I had time and wanted to, I’d make braids of the bread. They’d look so pretty and brown. They’d get thick. Somehow when it’s a different shape, it tastes different. I like the taste of the dobladitos the best, especially with butter. Father liked biscochitos [anise-flavored cookies], and Mother would make lots of biscochitos. Then when we had a lot of pumpkins, we’d have pumpkin pie, almost every day, till the pumpkins would run out. She made real good crusts with lard. Sometimes she’d make a big tortilla and then put filling, and fold it like a big emapanadita, a turnover about the size of the pan. So then she’d cut it in pieces, and with one empanadita we could eat two or three times—it was that long. That I remember. And then cakes. But mostly I guess we had pies, because we had more pumpkins and more apples, and we all loved pies more I guess. Mother used to make the best sweet rice, with meringue on top, and brown it in the oven, just a little, the meringue. That was a nice dessert. Other times, she’d just cook the rice with raisins and milk. We had a lot of rice. But the rice that I liked the most was the rice she made with fresh ravitos, the greens of the onions. Then sopa [bread pudding]—that’s another dessert that Mother used to make. We used the old bread for that, a layer of bread, and a layer of cheese and a layer of raisins, and then so on and so on until the pan was full. Then [we would] melt some white sugar into syrup and then put it on and it was good, because if you put it hot, it will melt the cheese. And panocha [sprouted wheat pudding], two parts of panocha flour and one part of white flour. Then you stir in the carmelized sugar and soak it, then bake it in the oven.

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Another thing that I remember for Lent, Mother used to cook peas, like split peas, but it was the whole pea, and then make chile caribe [coarse ground red chile] and sopaipillas [fried bread]. That was for Lent when we didn’t eat meat. There were split peas, the verdolagas, the spinach, and the sopaipillas, the sopa, the panocha, all that for Lent. We used to gather a lot of verdolagas and dry them for winter use. For Lent we’d soak them overnight and then cook them. They have a little bitter taste, like a tang, but they’re so good with beans. Most of the people would put coarse chili in the pan of the verdolagas and the quelites [lamb’s quarters] to sauté them—with onions and everything. Then the chile caribe or the chili with eggs. And torta huevo. That’s beat the white of the egg and then add the yellow and then fry it into little biscuits with lard and then put it in the chili. That’s delicious. People can eat it whenever they want to, but they did that because they didn’t eat meat during Lent. There was always fresh bread and hot chocolate. And then atole and chaqueue—that was made of blue corn meal. It was hard, almost like a hard cereal, like cooked corn meal.11 Atole was like a drink. Most everybody uses it with salt, but I like it with sugar, and even to this day a lot of people drink atole at night. It’s supposed to be very healthy. Have you heard of chicos? That’s the dried corn, like corn on the cob. You boil it and hang it out to dry. Then you take the grain off and cook it with beans or alone. You usually get tender corn because anything that’s tough is not going to taste good, because it’s already passed. It has to be tender. Then you kind of break two or three corns and hang them to dry, on the clothesline [laughs]. There’s no room for the clothes; no wash. I remember one time Mother had so many—oh, a clothesline full of chicos—and the horses came and ate them. Oh, she was so mad, everybody was mad, because the horses got loose, and imagine, they didn’t even have to lift their heads too high [laughs]. Everything tender, they ate the whole thing. Oh, my gosh, that year we didn’t have too many chicos because the horses ate the majority of it. At home we always used it. Mother would put half a cup of chicos with the beans. That’s the way she liked it. My father didn’t like it too well, but that’s the way we had it. Potatoes—we ate them fried, they were so good fried, in lard, yes, lots of lard. Mashed potatoes, too, for the big dinners, mashed potatoes and gravy. And in stews, we used a lot of stews, which is very good, because you have the meat and my father raised a lot of rotabagas, which he liked a lot. We would put them with the meat and the pota-

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toes and the carrots, with onions, fresh onions. We always had dried spinach, peas—wild spinach, we used to dry that. In the old days, we didn’t gather asparagus. When my brother, Crescenzio, got married, they did. I remember taking my sister-in-law Lucy to pick some, early in the morning before people picked them. They’re wild. They’re so good. We all like them with scrambled eggs. They’re very tasty with salt and pepper, very delicious. It’s a good breakfast, a very good breakfast. You have your eggs and your greens right away [laughs]. A good anything. A good breakfast burrito, because you can roll it in a tortilla, with a little piece of ham and bacon.

Ramona described a rich and tasty diet of mostly home-produced foods consisting of meat, beans, and potatoes—with tortillas or bread—supplemented with chili, eggs, root vegetables, greens, fruits, and wild foods. All these main foods were produced in the Antonito area, except for chili and some fruits, which people bought from traders who came up from New Mexico. Many of the older women remembered the itinerant merchants, colloquially called “Chameros” (after Chama, New Mexico) who went house to house in the late summer peddling food products from warmer New Mexico and contributing variety to the diet.12 Cordi Ornelas said the Chameros sold chiles, pozole (hominy), apples, apricots, peaches, black-eyed peas, pinto beans, white beans, and alberjones (yellow peas). Ramona Valdez remembered the Chameros bringing fresh fruit and vegetables in the summer and dried products such as hominy, sprouted wheat flour for panocha, atole, and chicos—in the fall. Most important, they brought chili—both the fresh green chili and the dried red chili. Chili flavored many dishes but was also used to make the widely eaten “red chili” and “green chili,” which are at the heart of San Luis Valley and northern New Mexico cooking. An excellent picture of the Mexicano diet over the last two-thirds of the twentieth century emerged from the The Eloyda V. Ruybal Cook Book. Eloyda Ruybal’s nine children compiled it for the 1997 Ruybal family reunion to honor their recently deceased mother. One of the children, Teddy Madrid, graciously gave me a copy. The book includes a photo of their mother in her kitchen in 1966, standing in front of the stove smiling and holding out a ball of dough in her hands. The youngest child, Rica, wrote the foreword. Each of the children, in chronological order, contributed favorite recipes, usually with commentary. Several emphasized that their mother was a wonderful cook whose “secret ingredient was love.”13 Many traditional favorites appear in the cookbook: meat dishes

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(carne adobada, meatloaf, venison, burriñates, morcillas, menudo, and cracklings), pinto beans, yellow peas, fried potatoes, toasted macaroni, red and green chili, champe (rose hip) jelly, carne seca (jerky), quelites, panocha, sopa, atole, and tamales. The cuisine defined in this tribute to their mother reflected the traditional Hispanic diet and the family’s connection to the land.

Meat: Domesticated and Wild Animal Foods In the first half of the twentieth century, many Mexicanos raised domesticated animals: cattle, sheep, chickens, pigs, and goats, both for their meat and for their by-products, especially eggs, butter, and cheese. Generally, men were in charge of the hunt and the grazing animals, and women took care of the small animals, especially chickens, and converted their products into food and sources of income (see Chap. 5). Meat was an important part of the diet when it could be obtained by production, hunting, purchase, or gifts.14 HELEN RUYBAL ON RAISING CATTLE AND BEEF

Helen Ruybal, born in 1906, grew up near the San Antonio River in Lobatos, where she remembered raising and butchering cattle. We killed a calf, a good calf, and we’d save the head right away, and then they’d peel it off like they do a pig, in hot water. After all the skin and the hair came off, then they’d put it in a pan here and soak it and put some spices on it; some didn’t put anything. Then they put it in the oven, and some people covered it with tinfoil, just to save the stove. Then when they ate it, you pulled off pieces of meat, and some people ate the brains. We didn’t eat the brains because we always had merchants to buy it, and we’d just give it to them. Others were there for the tripe. They’d take it out, and then at home they’d drain it good and then wash it good. They had funnels to wash it with water until one broke and start another one, clean, clean. Oh, the tripe, and they’d get burriñates! Oh, I had forgotten all about the name, and now I don’t see them anymore or hear about them. We made a lot of sausage and morcillas. Oh, my goodness, I forgot about that. They would make that for us on halves.15 Oh, yes, the panza, we loved it, but we gave it on halves also. Even when I was older and was more interested in saving, I used to do a little piece but not all of

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it, and then they’d do it in halves also. Riñones [kidneys]? Oh, yes! We sliced them in half and fried them. Some people liked liver for medicine. We used what we wanted right away and gave the rest to the helpers. Lengua [tongue]. Oh, that was expensive—to buy it. They used to tell me they’d go to the store and pay $5 for one cow tongue. And we liked it, too. After we cooked it, we sliced it like ham and ate it that way already cooked. We ate that a lot. We never ate heart, but we knew people who did. They told me they ground it in small pieces. Very few people wanted heart, but they cooked it and sliced it like meat. We used a lot of the inside that we liked, and we gave the rest [away], and then they fixed our share, our part of the share. Oh, that was a lot of fun. You’re making me hungry [laughs]. Later, my husband, Carlos, and I had a freezer. We had a freezer up until maybe two years ago. We used to pack a lot of roast beefs. They would butcher the steer the way I wanted. I wanted so many roast beef and so many steaks and hamburger. Carlos would order all those things, and I did, too, and then when we wanted them, they were wrapped real good and tight, real clean. And then we’d use whatever we wanted. We never bought meat or ran out of it until after Carlos died and we still had two freezers’ full. One time we had more meat than two freezers. My neighbor had a table freezer, and he offered us half of it for whatever meat we didn’t have room for. So we used that meat first, and we gave them meat, maybe steak one time or something like that. It was a lot of fun, and it was a little trouble for a minute, but then I could live with it. But now I ask why, why did I do it? It’s gone and we’re still alive. We didn’t die from eating so much meat. TEDDY MADRID ON FISHING, HUNTING, AND MAKING JERKY

In addition to meat from domesticated animals, people used to eat elk, deer, rabbit, fish, pheasant, duck, and wild birds. Many people remembered eating fish, which appears to have made a significant contribution to the diet in the past. Today it is far less important because of declining fish stocks and privatization of the river, making access more difficult. Teddy Madrid’s family did not raise cattle, but the men fished and hunted regularly so they had plenty of protein: “We had the pork and the chicken and the fish and the elk. The elk took the place of beef in every situation for us.” Making meat into jerky was an important method of preservation. Jerky could be eaten dry, or pounded and softened, or cooked into stews. Teddy remembered her parents making jerky together and her

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grandmother teaching her how to make it after her husband, Vincent, shot his first elk early in their marriage. At that time, it wasn’t hard to to kill rabbits. And there was fish, if the kids would go fish. My husband Vincent’s father died when he was seven years old. Vincent remembers going early in the morning to the river and catching fish and hunting rabbit. There was fish aplenty in the Conejos River. And my dad was probably, next to Martin Duran, the greatest fly fisherman I’ve ever known. He could go in the morning to the river, right across from our house, and come with a catch of fourteen, fifteen fish, more if we wanted, as many as Mom wanted to fry for breakfast. Venison and elk have been such a basic supply in our family. It started out with my dad. He was quite the sportsman in the winter. The way my husband, Vincent, got into it is very strange. We had just gotten married in 1956; and in 1957, in the fall, Vincent and I were going for a truckload of wood; he had a pickup. We were taking a lunch, and we stopped by to drop our baby, Anthony, off at my Mom’s. We got in the pickup to go, and my dad comes out and throws the rifle at Vincent, and Vincent catches it. My dad says, “Bring yourself an elk.” Vincent had never done hunting before, but he was in Korea, and he was good with the rifle. So we went up, loaded up the wood, and he was carrying the rifle. I don’t know if he expected to see anything, but we were going on the ledge on the wooded area. He was a little higher than I was, and I was below, walking, trying to catch up with him. He was carrying the rifle. An elk jumped over us, like from up on the hill, made a leap right over us, he didn’t hit us or anything, but he jumped over us out into the fields. Vincent got the gun, and BOOM, a clear hit. Then we said, “How are we going to get it into the truck?” Well, Vincent was very strong, and somehow or other—we had already loaded the truck with wood—he sort of drove the truck as far as he could, and he yanked—he pulled the elk to the truck and he had a knife. He cut part of it so he could get it up. We dumped some of the wood, and we stuck the elk on the top. We drove all the way down to my dad’s. Oh gosh, every time there was an elk at the house, everybody would come out and everyone got busy. That was when Vincent fell in love with hunting. After that, since he was free a lot, the hunt became a big thing. He would go with my dad and my brother, and my brother-in-law. My dad showed him how to cut it and cut out the different parts—the shoulder part, the legs. There is a portion in the leg of the elk that you have to remove immediately. It is a tendon down here that has like a pocket. If

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you do not remove that it ruins the elk meat completely. The men know more about this. My grandmother, my paternal grandmother, lived here in Antonito, and she would come and help me, give me ideas. She’s the one who helped me learn how to make the sesinitas. They call them sesinas, sesinitas de carne, the little jerky strips. I became quite adept at using the knife and making several cuts. You’d make several cuts with a piece of steak like this, you start cutting, cutting until you get several folds of it and stretch it out, you get a larger piece and thin, thin it out. She taught me how to do that, my grandmother did, with the first elk that we got. We hung it up on the clothesline, and then I watched it and watched it and watched my son, Anthony, and did everything in the house. So elk has become a big portion. We always have elk.

Teddy described her husband’s initiation into the important male activity of hunting. Like Teddy’s family, many in Antonito fished for trout and hunted elk and deer. The state of Colorado mandated license requirements and fees, limited the catch, and defined the open and closed seasons for each species.16 Hunting made an important contribution to the local diet by providing an abundant supply of high-quality protein at a relatively low cost through an activity deeply rooted in the culture.

Cultivated Foods: Grains, Beans, Vegetables, and Fruits While meat was important in the traditional Antonito diet, and available from hunting, ranching, purchase and gifts, plant foods—both cultivated and gathered—were the mainstay. People ate diverse grain products. Rather than the corn tortillas typical of warmer climates, they consumed wheat tortillas traditionally made at home. Helen Ruybal said they ate “bread and tortillas and buñuelos and empanadas.” Buñuelos, also known as sopaipillas, are like the fry breads so popular with southwestern Native Americans, and they sometimes took the place of bread or tortillas. They were made from a flour and yeast or baking powder dough that was formed into a triangular, round, or half-moon shape and deep fried. They were eaten plain or, sometimes, filled with honey. Grains and sweets were important sources of calories for the hardworking rural Mexicanos. Helen Ruybal emphasized starches in her mother’s cooking: “Fried potatoes, boiled potatoes, mashed potatoes and beans. What else? A lot of rice. A lot of rice. The rice, just like a dessert, like a pudding. Then Mother made another kind of rice with salt, with tomato sauce. We used to eat a lot of macaroni.” 82

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In addition to many wheat and rice dishes, people in Antonito ate corn fresh on the cob or dried and cooked in various dishes with Mexican origins: menudo, pozole, chicos, atole, and tamales. Ramona Valdez remembered her family going to pick corn at farms in Monte Vista. If they didn’t pick it, then they bought sacks and sacks of it to dry or freeze. They made chicos by steaming, drying, and dehusking tender corn. Many women reported that their families had big gardens when they were growing up and raised many kinds of vegetables and fruits, including radishes, lettuce, turnips, carrots, onions, corn, turnips, rutabagas, potatoes, wax beans, string beans, green beans, peas, yellow beans, bolita beans, habas beans, cabbage, cauliflower, pumpkins, squash, calabacitas,17 rhubarb, strawberries, crabapples, and apricots. Monica Taylor’s grandmother had “a major garden.” “Whatever came out of that garden,” she said, “is what you ate the next winter.” Many women planted a variety of vegetables that they ate fresh in the summer and dried, canned, or stored in root cellars for the long winter. ASUNCIONITA MONDRAGON ON HER GRANDPARENTS’ GARDEN IN LA ISLA

They always planted on May 3, el día de Santa Cruz [the day of the Holy Cross]. In the evening we’d go weed, and in the month of May we would go cover the plants so that they wouldn’t freeze as they were coming out. Oh, my gosh, they had a room bigger than this room here, full of cans. One side, they opened them completely, and the other side they wouldn’t open completely so that the lid could cover the plant as it was coming up. We’d all go at night and do it, and then in the morning Grandpa and Grandma would remove the cans and put them back in the storage house that they had. That went on until the last frost. In those days they used to claim St. Anthony’s feast day was the last frost, which was June 13. By that time the plants were already big. We had string beans, carrots, pumpkins, potatoes, corn, all the vegetables, radishes, turnips, yes, they had everything. They used to raise cabbage, but they used to start their beds in February in the house and then transplant them in the spring. The cabbage and tomatoes, they used to do that. My grandma used to dry calabacitas. She used to slice them across. Grandpa had made her big, long boards where they’d wash them real good. They didn’t put anything on them. Then they would dry, and when they were needed to be cooked they’d bring them out and rinse them in hot water and boil them a little, and then they were done. They used to dry green chili, too. The Traditional Diet

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TEDDY MADRID ON FOOD PRODUCTION IN LAS MESITAS

Teddy Madrid had a vivid recollection from the 1940s of growing garden vegetables and one of the most important field crops—bolita beans—that dominated the diet until people began to eat the larger pintos imported from New Mexico. I remember distinctly my father and my grandfather, plowing up the llano. My grandfather had horses and a plow, and he was plowing up the llano, about a seventeen-acre lot. They planted it with bolita beans. I remember the crop that they harvested that year because all of us children went out to pick the beans. We would pull the bean plant as it was beginning to dry, and we learned how to place it in a circle, the roots facing in, until we made three-foot piles of beans, just the plants. Then they just let them sit out to dry. When they were ready my grandmother would get everybody; it was a family thing. We would just thresh out the beans, and they’d put another canvas on top. All the young children would just step on it, all around. Then all the men would just flip up the canvases afterwards, and winnow out the chaff with the wind. They’d choose a day when there was a good breeze, and they would harvest hundreds of pounds of bolita beans. The foods that I miss, of course they are the ones my mom used to grow. My mother would produce red beets, rutabagas, and the turnips, and the radishes. She’d grow both the red and the white radishes. I miss those. She’d plant the white corn, I don’t know why. She’d never get a lot of ears, but she was a never-giver-up. She wouldn’t give up on these things. Those are the things that I miss. And her strawberries, she had a little strawberry patch. My grandmother used to plant little red potatoes, and now supposedly all the seed is patented, but they used to grow the potatoes, and when they were ready and they weren’t quite big enough, they’d send us out, and we’d dig at the plants, and we’d get out the tiny little red potatoes because those were the favorites—they still are—and they sell them for I don’t know how much. But we’d get these little red potatoes, and then my grandmother would grease them with lard and put them in the oven, and out would come these beautiful little red potatoes, enough for a family, a large family, because we’d get plenty of them, and, oh, those were delicious. Those we don’t get to eat anymore. Oh, yes, [my mother kept seeds]. The habas, the bolita beans, the potatoes . . . and the corn seeds. I think I mentioned this to you about 84

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the kernels of corn and my mother-in-law going out with [my son] Anthony to plant the corn? So she helped him, “OK, Anthony” in Spanish, “Ahora vamos a sembrar el maíz”—”Now we’re going to plant maize.” He was so curious, and he was so excited, and here comes Grandma and the little packet of the kernels to plant, but he says, “Grandma, where are the mice? Where are they?” He was just a little kid, and she—I don’t know why she was taking care of him, probably I was teaching. “Where are the mice?” It just shows the confusion in language for our kids sometimes. But also I’ve always teased Anthony, “Where are the mice?”

BERNADETTE VIGIL ON RED AND GREEN CHILI

Two foods that were central to the Antonito diet for flavor and tradition were “red chili” and “green chili.” These terms referred not only to the peppers themselves but also to the dishes made with them. Bernadette Vigil described them in detail. Green chiles will be coming in August. You can buy them by the bushel, or you can buy them by the sack—I think it’s twenty pounds. I buy two sacks. Two. I roast my own. It’s a hot job. When you get your green chiles, you soak them in water. Then you spread them evenly on the rack in the oven. Make sure your oven is at 400 degrees because it needs to be hot. You give them about four minutes on one side, and then you turn them, and keep turning them, because you don’t want to burn them. If they burn, you’ve lost them, and they’re too expensive to lose, so you’ve got to be real careful. Then after you get them out of the oven—as hot as they are—you get them and you stick them in a baggie and toss them right in the freezer. Oh, my green chili, here’s how I make it. First of all, you can get the pork in little steaks, or you can get big pieces and just cut them into little cubes. Then I put some oil in a frying pan, and I fry the pork with a little bit of flour. Then you put your garlic in, and your onion, and then you put your green chile, the fresh ones, chopped up in your machine, or you can chop them by hand with a knife. Then you add some water and let it boil. Then you get that Bouquet Secret, that browning stuff, and add a little bit of that—just a dash to give it a little bit of color. And then you put your green chile in there. Now the red chili. What I do is I buy the lean meat, lean hamburger. You fry it, put your onions and your garlic, and then put your chili powder. But you’ve got to be careful what kind of chili powder you buy. Because the one that’s already prepared for you—you don’t know The Traditional Diet

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what’s really in the prepared one. So if you buy it rojo, which is just plain simple toasted in the oven, then you can put your own stuff into it. And if you want to make your own chili, you can get these ristras, they’re called ristras de chile colorado [strings of red chiles]. Or you can get them in the bags and just clean them and soak them and stick them in the oven. But you’ve got to watch real good, too, because they’ll toast wicked, and once they’re burned, oh, you get the most awful taste. So you just toast them real light, and then you put them in a blender if you want to, and you add your seasoning to that, and you get the wildest, hottest red chili. You can use comino [cumin], and you can use, maybe a little bit of cilantro—maybe, but not very much. And garlic for sure, and salt, and that’s about it.

Gathered Plant Foods and Medicines In addition to the garden crops, Mexicanas gathered many wild products. Their documentation adds to the body of knowledge about Mexicanos’ rich and sustainable land use and contributes to Chicano environmentalism (Peña 1998c). Some wild plants were extremely important to the diet, especially quelites, verdolagas, and piñon nuts. They also gathered champes and capulines (chokecherries) for jelly, and asparagus, oregano, wild strawberries, mushrooms, and many medicinal plants. HELEN RUYBAL ON THE IMPORTANCE OF PIÑON IN HER FAMILY

Many women remembered eating pine nuts in their youth, and they still eat it. They harvested pine nuts in the fall from the cones of the piñon pine tree. Tasty and nutritious, containing fat, thiamine, and protein (Coon 1958, 207),18 pine nuts were eaten roasted and in various recipes such as cookies and empanaditas. Because pine nuts were abundant and could be freely gathered in the hills between Antonito and Ojo Caliente, New Mexico, they made an important contribution to the diet, providing both nutrition and variety. In 2005 Teddy Madrid told me that people still gathered piñon, and one local couple had collected eighty pounds that summer. Helen Ruybal described their use in her family in the 1920s and 1930s. On Saturdays, my father would get the horses and the wagon, and he’d get a big canvas. He’d go to the mountains by himself, over here to Cerro de la Olla and San Antonio Mountain, and he’d go over there

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going to Ojo Caliente where there were a lot of piñon nuts, and he would spread that canvas on the ground and get a stick, and he’d shake the trees. He’d come home with a big stack of piñones with the leaves and everything. So the next day he would put it out, looking for a windy day. He’d push it up with a pitchfork, and he’d lift it up, and all those needles were just running every which way, and the piñon nuts would stay, until he had just a pile of piñon nuts. Then we’d toast them, and at night those were our feast, just eating piñon nuts. I had a sister Gloria, my niece that we raised as a sister. While I did some reading here, she’d peel my piñon nuts, my share, and she’d hand them to me. I’d eat them by the mouthful until they were gone. She did that every time, because we ate piñon nuts all summer and all winter. Sometimes all the people would go; even my sister and I, the family, we went one day. One Sunday, they’d go, in a car, a fancy car, or a pickup, and they’d pick the piñones up from the ground, but they came home maybe with one pound, another was three pounds, and good pickers came even with a ten-pound bucket. They’d bring those piñon nuts only for the next week, until they’d go again. But we had at home a huge pile of piñones. If my father had time or wanted to go again, he’d go and get some more.

TEDDY MADRID ON GATHERING WILD FOODS IN LAS MESITAS

My mother would make it a daily ritual with one of the girls to go out with bags and they would pick the greens, the spinach. My mother would call it quelites. That was the way it was known, the wild spinach, and there was plenty around. In the forest we would find oregano. We would find asparagus. The other thing my mother would do, that we were all part of, in the fall we would go out and pick the champes, the rose hip berries. There were plenty until the highway department got hold of the bushes that were all along the road, and they killed a lot of them. They grew along the road and toward the forest. With my mother, we would pick the champes, and this went on clear until my mother got old and she couldn’t do it anymore. As a matter of fact, I think the last time that she picked the champes, and made the champe jelly from the rose hip berries, was in the 1990s when we noticed that my mother was getting Alzheimer’s. She had made a batch of her champe jelly; it was a delicacy. You probably have heard about how they used this a great deal. What I didn’t find out for a long time

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was that the rose hips and the berries—that is where we got our vitamin C, and from the green chiles, too. Those were our sources of vitamin C. So we ate a lot of healthy foods.

RAMONA VALDEZ ON HEALING HERBS

Of all the women I talked to, Ramona Valdez had the richest memory of wild plants with salutary properties. The plants she mentioned are listed in Appendix 4. Mother had a whole bunch of herbs, and she used them for this and that. Imortal,19 I remember, is a root. We had a real fine grater, and we always had it in a place in a glass with the imortal there. So at night I’d scrape some imortal and soak it in water, and then she’d drink the water, and the rest—the little bit that was left—she’d put it on her chest. She said it helped her. She believed it was a heart medicine. Then she had maravilla [common marigold] that I scraped and made into white powder and made it fine with cheesecloth, sifted it, and then rubbed it on her legs. Just the powder, no water. It was supposed to get the swelling down. Maravilla was a root, but from what I don’t know. Have you heard of amole [soaproot]? That’s another root that they used for the hair; it’s very good as a shampoo. It is a root, and you soak it in water, and with that water you wash your hair, and you can save the root for lots of uses. It doesn’t wear out in a single time. Mother said she always was looking for amole, because in those years they washed their wool blankets in amole. It didn’t discolor them, and the wool blankets in those years were homemade, homespun, home dyed— everything was—and they had to preserve them, and they washed them with amole. That was the finest of the soaps that they had at that time. Then there is malvas [dwarf mallow]. That’s a weed around here. The malvas were used to make a tea and make me dream, that was for my monthly. When I had cramps, Mother said that would help. So I don’t know how many malvas I gathered. Then there is plumajillo [yarrow]. Have you heard of plumajillo? I used to gather bags and bags of plumajillo and dry it and have it all winter. I’d boil some—that was for her kidneys. I guess it helped, because as sickly as mother was, she lived until seventy-two. Plumajillo is beautiful, it’s a featherlike leaf. And then there’s the one that they call Anglo plumajillo. This one is wild, and it’s wider, the Anglo is wider, and they call it plumajillo, too. I used to gather the wild. We had a lot of it there at the meadow. August is the time to gather the herbs. In August, they say, they are most potent. 88

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Oshá [lovage], that’s very good as an antibiotic. In fact, I used to use that to wash my teeth when I felt a little toothache. I still have some. And oshá, they say it chases away the snakes when you go hiking, and they put some in your boots or somewhere in your pants. That’s what I’ve heard. I don’t know how true it is. We had oshá for a toothache, as a rinse for your mouth, a preventive for infection. If you have a tooth pulled out or you have a boil, you rinse with that. I only had two boils in my life that I remember—and one remedy was to split a pea, a dried bean, and put it there, and it gathers the pus. It works. Chamiso pardo [sagebrush]—in later years my brother used to drink a lot of tea of that. I don’t like the taste; it’s very bitter. But it seems to help some people for the flu and for strain and for everything, everything it helps [laughs], toothaches, arthritis. My brother used to drink a lot. I have some in that bag in back of the door that my nephew brought me so that I could boil it when I was sick. I was drinking it for my lungs. I thought it was good. A lot of people use it for all types of ailments and for colds. They say it’s very good for colds. My brother used chokecherry bark. He said it was good for the heart. He’d boil the bark, and green sap comes out. It tastes good. Also the champes, we used to make a lot of jelly out of that. They used to say that champes were good for anxiety. You boil them as a tea. But what we used rose hips for was to make jelly. I guess we didn’t have anxieties. Only to eat it! There was a yerba buena [peppermint] and poleo [spearmint]. Yerba buena as a tea was for the stomach, either bloating or discomfort. Sometimes we’d make lemonade and put some leaves of poleo in it. We dried some to make tea. It’s very good for the stomach, too. In fact, I buy it sometimes, but it doesn’t taste as strong as when you pick it yourself and dry it.

Conclusion: Food, Place, and Culture Although I asked many women about their roles in plant cultivation and gathering, few, except for Ramona, retained much knowledge. What I learned I have included here in an effort to inspire further study of this important topic. Recent studies have emphasized the importance of women’s botanical knowledge (Howard 2003a, 2003b). In their roles as gardeners, food preservers, and cooks, women have developed knowledge of plants and the land and contributed to biological and cultural diversity and preservation. With the decline of subsistence agropastoral economies, however, women’s ties to the land have weakened, and knowledge gained over generations is vanishing. The Traditional Diet

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Research on Mexicanas’ food traditions aids the larger project of Chicano environmentalism—to document “local ethnoscientific knowledge” and Mexicanas/os’ “place-centered identity” (Peña and Mondragon-Valdéz 1998, 317–318). Mexicanas who grew up on ranches in the Antonito area remembered a land-based subsistence economy in which they raised much of their food, purchasing the rest from vendors from the nearby warmer climes of northern New Mexico and eastern Colorado. Local food tied Mexicanos to their land, community, and cultural traditions. Many practiced a renewable lifestyle, sustaining themselves, as well as the land, water, and wild. The traditional diet of Antonito seems to have been quite healthy, with abundant carbohydrates, a diverse supply of grown and gathered fruits and vegetables, good vegetable protein, and varying amounts of animal protein. But at the turn of the new millennium, the open pasture ranching typical of the region was in serious decline because of drought, the rising cost of feed and pasture rents, the burning down of the local slaughterhouse in Sanford, and the distance to other slaughterhouses and markets. Farming focused on cash crops such as barley, alfalfa, and potatoes. Small food producers were few, and most Mexicanos had given up growing gardens for a variety of reasons—because water was more costly and less available, gardens were hard work, and plant knowledge was declining, and perhaps also because gardening had come to be associated with poverty. This decline of the traditional food production system reverberated throughout people’s daily lives, changing their relationships to food, to each other, and to the homeland. In the next chapter I turn to women’s work in the traditional food system, as well as other forms of work they practiced over the course of the twentieth century. Through their work, women forged meaning and economic independence, which were critical to their gender status.

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“We’ve Got to Provide for the Family”

Women, Food, and Work

Production, Reproduction, and Gender Antonito women articulated their gender identity through stories of courtship, marriage, gender ideals, and work. Over several generations these women have been providers as well as nurturers. They have worked inside and outside the home and taken pride in their public and domestic contributions. They have benefited from the relatively flexible gender definitions of the Upper Rio Grande region stemming from “frontier conditions and low population” (Swadesh 1974, 178), as well as from longstanding patterns of seasonal male migration for work (Deutsch 1987). Throughout their history in the siete condados, Mexicanas have made important contributions to the family economy. In Antonito, women have always had responsibility for producing, preserving, cooking, and serving food in the home—and some have labored with food outside the home as cooks, caterers, restaurant owners, or waitresses. Many have contributed their effort to commensal feasts such as church potlucks, family reunions, birthday parties, and funeral dinners (see Chap. 9). Even a teacher like Helen Ruybal—who minimized housework as much

as she could—conducted some food work. While in some cases domestic chores held women back from paid jobs, in other cases they provided skills that launched women into public work. Moreover, many women allocated wages that they earned at jobs outside the home to provide food for their families, as Teddy Madrid demonstrated by using her first paycheck as a teacher to buy steak and oranges for her sisters. While the home and the public domain were in some ways distinct, women shuttled back and forth between them, very often through their command of food, weaving them together, blurring their boundaries, and mitigating the dichotomy between production and reproduction that has historically lowered women’s social status.1 The privatization and devaluation of women’s labor have characterized much of women’s food work since the global decline of subsistence farming, but women in Antonito have resisted the production/reproduction dichotomy and have struggled to balance the two domains in their multiple activities and identities. When Helen Ruybal fulfilled her dream of becoming a teacher by completing a high school degree in the mid-1920s, she saw that it would be very difficult to work full-time and take care of all the reproductive labor involved in running a home and having a husband and family. Her story about resisting marriage revealed cultural practices and expectations for women when she was coming of age in the 1920s and 1930s and how these clashed with her desire to be a working woman. Her story called into sharp relief key issues for women in balancing their independence and autonomy with cultural expectations that they be wives and mothers. HELEN RUYBAL’S STORY OF COURTSHIP AND MARRIAGE

In the seventeen interviews we did, Helen told the story of her marriage to Carlos Ruybal three times, always in great detail. The last time she told it she was ninety-five years old. She was suffering severe back pain and kept shifting around in the chair with a pained look on her face. I asked if she wanted to stop the interview, and she replied firmly, “No, I want to finish my wedding, and then I’ll work up to let you go.” Her wedding marked a major turning point in her life, one about which she was highly ambivalent. She had been a teacher for almost a decade, living at home, where her mother and sister did the domestic chores and left Helen free to work, play the piano, and read. She knew that marriage would threaten her independence and her career by imposing

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Helen Ruybal in her living room with photos of her children on the wall behind her.

responsibilities for taking care of home, husband, and children. Helen’s story was interesting because she differed from many other girls in the early twentieth century in prioritizing work over marriage. She began her story with the courtship that went on at local dances and highlighted the importance of conforming to societal mores. Oh, I was about sixteen or eighteen, and we lived out in Lobatos. We couldn’t even have boyfriends come to the house. We couldn’t go riding or dating. The only place we could go was to dances with chaperones. We weren’t free. There would be dances here, every Saturday. Carlos and I just were there, spending our money. He was for fun, and we danced all night, and he spent money. We had met everywhere, I guess. My parents and his parents were friends and well acquainted with each other. We used to go to the same church and go to the same stores, and they [Carlos’s family] were sheep men. Well, finally, finally, Carlos wanted to chum around with me for sure, and tell my dad and mom, and his dad and mom, and I didn’t want to. I said, “I’m not ready.” I was about twenty-six. Oh, and then my motherin-law liked me very well, and my father told Carlos that if he wanted to come to my house to ask permission that he could come in to talk to me, so he did. He wanted to visit with me and with them, too. But his mother had said that he had to get permission, and then she would be glad and happy. So it went on, and I couldn’t quit teaching. I said, “I will not quit teaching.” Finally he said, “You don’t have to quit teaching, just keep on going.” Two or three years after, my folks kept pushing me, and his folks kept

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pushing him. So the parents and he came to my house and said that we had been going long enough and that we knew each other and that they would all be more comfortable if they knew where we were going. I still didn’t want to agree on getting married. I still was at school teaching. Finally everyone kept pushing; they liked him and they liked me. So I agreed, and we got married—quietly, just family. Here in this church, St. Augustine Church. I took a week off school, and we went to Denver. My brother and my sister-in-law went with us because they were the padrinos [sponsors]. When we came back, they had dinner at my house in Lobatos for the families, and they were many. At that time there could have been twelve kids in Carlos’s family, all grown up. When we got home, they were all waiting for us, and we were at the dinner already when an orchestra—a guitar, violin, and more guitars— stopped to serenade us. They were the school board members, and some other ones. They sang and they sang, and I didn’t like it. I don’t know how I got into it because I didn’t like it. They kept singing and calling for us to let them in, so we let them in. I was numb, I was just paralyzed there, and they came in and they sang another little bit, and then they said, “Now we’re waiting for the reward, for the prize, for the wedding [dance].” When you got married and they sang to you, and they came in serenading, you had to pay back something. You had to give a dance. That’s what they wanted. So they asked Carlos and me, “Come on, what about the dance?” “No, we don’t want any dance,” Carlos said. “Well you have to give us a dance Saturday.” Which would be about two days after. We said no. Carlos said, “I can’t give you a dance because I won’t be able to be here. But I’ll give you money and you go ahead and have the dance. We’ll give you money for the music and the hall.” Well, finally they had refreshments, and they said, “We’ll be looking for you Saturday. We’ll have the two halls ready and the music—guitars and violins.” But we went to his mother’s house, and we didn’t come. I didn’t want to come to a wedding dance. I just felt like I had gone over the line somewhere. I just wished I could stop and say no after the thing was said and done, because I liked to work my job. But I didn’t like this at all. I thought, “Well, I’ll be responsible for a lot of things that I don’t care to.” I just felt like it was another kind of life and that I would be responsible for things that I never gave a thought to, and I could not see myself away from home. I had been waited on, and then I wouldn’t have

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anybody to wait on me. I don’t know how in the world I got married, to this day. I wasn’t eager. I wasn’t getting ready to go buy a gown or prepare a list of invitations. I didn’t want anything like that. All the other girls got things ready—like dishes and everything. They were looking for a wedding, a dance, a church wedding, for sponsors, and for everything. I didn’t care. Carlos wanted to get married, and his parents, too. They were happy. I acted happy, I guess, but I wasn’t. I mean I had deep thoughts behind me. I was acting. I would have to be responsible to keep up a house, and I’d have to settle down, and I never settled down. I came to church when I felt like it and I got home when I felt like it, and nobody cared, and nobody needed explanations. The kind of freedom I had, I knew well that it wouldn’t continue like that. I said to myself, “Now if I go somewhere I’ve got to ask permission. I have to come back on time. And maybe I won’t even be able to go, maybe I’d have to go with my husband.” I always thought of the children; I always had them in mind. I said, if I get married, for sure, that’s what I’m going to have, children. I didn’t want any, but they came anyway. That’s what I always dreaded about being a mother. I always thought I won’t be able to do with my children the way I want to, the way they should be, because I’ll be too busy working. I didn’t feel like I even knew how to raise children, or how good I would be. I’d rather go by myself to school and forget. They used to tell me, “You like to deal with children at school,” but I just quit at four and forgot it. I didn’t have to be getting up in the middle of the night. I could just see those things were going to happen, and I just wasn’t ready, but I made it and nothing ever happened. So I went and I raised the two kids in the summertime. In the wintertime I had a girl day and night. You can’t find that now, but I had to pay, and one of them was my cousin. I used to hire them for the year. They’d cook and they’d take care of the house and they’d take care of the kids. Then when the kids went to school, I started trying myself, and I felt responsibility, but I didn’t want to use my hands. I didn’t want to use my time. When they were in third and fourth grade, I sent them to boarding school, and I got rid of all the work. Oh, I didn’t like being a mother [laughs]. I didn’t like to take care of babies’ upkeep, and I didn’t want to have any interference to go to school and teach.

Helen Ruybal’s bluntness about not wanting children or marriage was unusual and striking. It was linked to her commitment to work and to her reluctance to give up the freedom and independence she had while

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living at home, where her mother and sister freed her from household chores. She was definitely outside the mainstream. No other women I knew expressed a similarly forceful antipathy toward marriage and children, though many felt the social pressure to marry and the burdens of domestic servitude Helen articulated.

Gender Expectations and Practices As Helen Ruybal’s story made clear, women had most of the responsibility for domestic work in Antonito in the first half of the twentieth century. But the nature of that work depended on the family. In farm families, it spanned a wide range of activities, including animal husbandry, gardening, food preservation, cooking, cleaning, sewing clothes and bedding, and raising children, often many children in the old days. Eighty-year-old Celina Romero described the common division of labor: “Well, the boys’ chores were usually with their dad outside, and with different animals, and the girls’ were just the kitchen, the household chores.” That, however, was an idealized division of labor. The women’s life histories showed that the actual division of labor was quite malleable, according to what needed to be done and who was around to do it. TEDDY MADRID ON HER FAMILY’S FLEXIBLE GENDER DIVISION OF LABOR

In sixty-six-year-old Teddy Madrid’s family, there were seven children, six girls and a boy. Because the boy was the youngest, the girls had to do what otherwise might have been defined as male chores. Since my dad did not have a boy, he chose me. I was supposed to be my mom’s helper in male chores, like chopping wood, bringing in water, doing anything that my mother needed outside. I had to do it—fixing [things] and carrying this and carrying that. I was the chosen one. I was sort of like the son that my father didn’t have for such a long time. So I had a lot of responsibilities that he gave me, but they were not in my mother’s kitchen. My mother’s kitchen was always her kitchen. My sister Margie was more domestic. I was daring and doing things. If the roof needed patching, I’d get up there. If the chickens needed killing, I’d kill them. If Mother needed wood, I would get it for her, and chop it. My job was always to keep my mom supplied with the coal, the water.

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MONICA TAYLOR ON THE STRONG WOMEN IN HER FAMILY

Far from defining themselves as incapable of doing hard physical work, many Antonito women embraced outdoor chores and vaunted their strength and contributions to their families. As Monica Taylor said of her aunts, “They painted, they did wood crafting, they built their own homes, they did their own thing. They were ornery and cantankerous and bullheaded and vivacious, and they just did their thing.” Monica’s relatives exploded stereotypes about gender and provided models of female strength and independence that Monica continued. I was not afraid of anything. It started with my grandmother’s stories of when she was little. Her mother called her a billy goat because she was on the rooftop, she was in the trees, she was in the haystack, she was chopping wood, and I grew up exactly the same way. I butchered chickens with a hatchet. As I became old enough I butchered lamb, whatever was there. We used to haul our own firewood—that was strongly a women’s thing. There were strong physical endurance feats that you had to meet. That’s just the way it was. I can remember growing up splitting firewood. I don’t remember hardly ever seeing any of my uncles split firewood, because Grandma already had it done. We would move the furniture around—we’d pick it up and move it. There was no dragging it across the floor. If you worked on the roof of the house, the women were doing it. If there was outside work with the house, the women did it. The women ruled with an iron fist; that’s just the way that women did their thing, and it’s carried on. I get the biggest kick out of my daughter Erika because she is the same way. It kind of cracks me up sometimes to watch her because she just—boom—she whips things into shape, right now. There are no ifs, ands, or buts. I just have to sit back and laugh at her. Score one point for family relation there, family ancestry, she’s a go-getter. You can’t stop that little girl. I look at my granddaughter, and she is just like her mother. Erika tells me sometimes, she says, “Damn, Mom, she acts just like you.” I say, “Yeah, I wonder where she got it from?” My granddaughter, Shanaia, is afraid of nothing. I think my great-grandmother would have gotten a kick out of watching Shanaia.

HELEN RUYBAL ON GENDER RELATIONS AND IDEALS

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a steady job, she was able to enlist help in the home from her rancher husband, Carlos, whom she described as willingly pitching in on domestic chores that other men disdained. Yet even as she recognized cultural variability in gender relations, Helen gave an articulate definition of an ideal based on mutual respect and support that may not have been shared by everyone in her community but that provided an important point of view. Her narrative showed the importance of women’s economic independence to their status and power, something noted by others who have studied Chicana/o gender relations.2 When I started, I earned more money than Carlos. When I got married, Carlos and I banked together. But some [couples] want to divide their money, and I have seen divorces—because she spends her money the way she wants to and he spends his. Sometimes the lady has more money—either came with more money or got a better job—and she doesn’t want to share with the man if he needs it or the man share with the lady. To me, I feel like a bank account should be together and both hold each other’s reins a little bit. [Women who work are] all envied. Women who work are lucky because they just have a little more than anybody else. They just plan on things, and contribute to things. People told me that I shouldn’t be so free, I shouldn’t be so extravagant, and I shouldn’t be so out to work, because I never did get away from work, especially if there was moneymaking. People just wanted that a lady’s job is a lady’s job. They didn’t expect the wife to go out and plow the garden or to pick up the plants or brush. They didn’t like for them to do men’s jobs. A man’s job would be a man’s job. But I knew husbands who did all the housework, and they took care of the babies, put them to bed and fed them, dressed them, and changed the diapers, and people would laugh at that; they laughed at me, too. People would be nasty about it—some would—they were jealous. They didn’t want men to be that soft and kindhearted. But others said, “Well, she deserves it, that he be considerate. She deserves that help. If she works and earns the bread and butter, why not do the dishes for her and do the floor, and make the beds and things like that?” And others would think that that’s ladies’ work. Some men didn’t do anything but eat and provide—provide flour, provide money, provide salt and pepper—all those things, but they wouldn’t do anything in the kitchen. Carlos liked to be a helper always. I didn’t sit down here and watch. I did other things that had to be done, even little things and bigger things

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in the home, or in my job, my duty. Because I had to be prepared for that every day, and I saw that I was before I tackled anything else. In the mornings, when I went to Taos [to teach], Carlos would get up early in the morning and run my car, warm and ready to go, and he’d come in and prepare breakfast for me. He saw me out, and the dishes were left on the table and buying more bread was left on the table, and he’d get those things ready for the week. A man should be considerate and consider [a woman’s] ways, her ideals, whether he likes them or not. But if he’s a good man, he’ll give in to an extent and not hurt the other party. And the same thing with a lady. She should know that she’s really under his care, not boss. Men don’t like to be bossed. She has to consider his necessities, his needs. Those things make a couple happy. So there is consideration required, because if you want to be it, too bad, there will be trouble always. The man doesn’t have to be the boss just because he’s the man. They’re partners. It’s consideration and healthy mind. After all, you’re yourself, you are another person, and you have given yourself to a big extent. But not to just be hammered down, or deprived of everything. That’s bad. Because you feel like a baby in bad hands. No man or woman should feel inferior or be made inferior by the opposite. Because if you feel like you are inferior, why finally you lose interest in doing the right thing or doing anything at all.

At ninety-four, Helen Ruybal articulated an idealized vision of malefemale equality and mutual respect that sounded very modern. She presented a vision based in women’s value, value that they demonstrated day in and day out through their work—both inside and outside the home.

Women and Food Work One important way in which women contributed to the family’s wellbeing and established their own importance was through their food work. For the first two-thirds of the twentieth century, farming and ranching families produced most of their own food during the short growing season and preserved it for winter. Women had to put hard physical labor into growing, drying, canning, freezing, and storing food in root cellars, but they assured an adequate and nutritious diet for the whole year. The hot, often windy climate and low humidity was well suited for drying food. Mexicanas made jerky (sesinas or carne seca) from all kinds of meat. They dried vast quantities of vegetables and herbs. They dried

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domestic and wild fruit. They canned everything: meat, fish, milk, fruit, and vegetables. The difficult, time-consuming work of food provisioning was easier, though more costly, when freezers became ubiquitous in the last quarter of the twentieth century. TEDDY MADRID ON FOOD PRESERVATION

The ability of Antonito families to grow and preserve their own food was a buffer against economic hardship. Teddy Madrid was born in 1934 and remembered the impact of the Great Depression, which her family rode out as so many in Antonito did by producing their own subsistence outside of the cash economy. This is the way they survived during the depression. My paternal grandmother and my father dug a big cellar on the east side of my grandmother’s house, one of these long adobe houses. They dug it very deep, and they put shelves, and my grandmother would can and she would make her jellies, all kinds of jellies. She would make the chokecherry. I didn’t like it. But it was jelly, and a lot of people do like it. She would make the champes. Then she would make different kinds of manzanitas, little berries, the gooseberries and the wild berries. Those everybody had around—the green ones. And then there’s some really delicious ones that I’m not sure what they’re called. Boysenberries? They’re the big ones. Then they had crabapples and strawberries. Her cellar was always full. She would dry corn on the cob and string them. She would dry chiles, she would dry apples, she would dry champes and other manzanitas berries that she didn’t make into jelly. Then they’d have their beans. My grandmother would dry the pumpkins, the little yellow pumpkins—she’d slice them. Even my mother, they’d dry onion, they could dig in [the cellar] and put the carrots and save the carrots. The red beets, they put them as long as they could, and the potatoes put them as long as they could in that cellar. They would store as much as they could. My mother would make jerky. But since [she always did it in] late fall, she always had to be careful if she would hang it out on the line, because the crows would come and take it away. She would soak it—my dad always liked it in chile caribe. That was her marinade: water and salt and chile caribe, and always garlic. She and my dad were fast at making the strips. She would hang them up, and they would dry, and she would bring them in at night. She’d have one of the girls or somebody watching those things.

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MONICA TAYLOR ON GARDENING AND PRESERVING FOOD

Monica Taylor was born in 1960, twenty-six years after Teddy Madrid, and she, too, remembered a rich subsistence economy centered on growing and preserving food. When Grandma made a garden it was probably about the size of a quarter of an acre. I mean it was a major garden. Grandma would plant a lot of squash, spinach, peas, green beans, carrots, potatoes, corn, chili, onion. She grew beans, too. I remember Grandma, everything we had, she made. Everything. The canning jars were saved year after year. We used to have the old beeswax to seal the jars. From probably August through October you were canning—every day. There was no ifs, ands, or buts. If her kids would come and visit us from some part in New Mexico, two or three bushels of fruit from one or the other. Grandma had a humongous pantry, and everything got stored in there. There was one of these sliding ladders like they use in libraries. Grandma would say, “Go get this, this, and this,” and that’s what we’d get.

JANICE DEHERRERA ON FOOD PREPARATION

Born in Albuquerque in 1955, Janice DeHerrera learned about preserving food in college and put her knowledge into practice in the early 1980s soon after she got married and moved to Antonito. We had our garden and we had so much food and the Mormon people here teach you how to can so that you have more for the winter.3 We went to the cannery in Sanford, and we used those facilities, me and my mother-in-law would do our canning together. Then I also canned on my own. I became interested in that because I was a home economics major, but I think that it is only a theory until you have a family. When you are single it’s like, “Oh yes, we can preserve food that way,” but not until you have a lot of hungry people around you do you see the importance of canning your food. I used to can maybe a hundred jars of beans, and everybody would say, “Well, why do you go can pinto beans? You just put them in the pressure cooker or the crockpot and it’s just as easy.” But it’s convenience. Maybe your brothers-in-law would come in from hunting, and they’ll bring all their friends, and they want you to cook for them. Here you are at eight or nine o’clock at night, all these

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hungry men. Are they going to wait another hour and a half while the beans cook in the pressure cooker? So this was convenience. My brother-in-law and his wife would bring a truckload of food, and I would can it. They would go pick tomatoes and bring boxes of tomatoes. They were the sweetest tomatoes you ever had because they would stay on the vine. They were more like a fruit than a vegetable. They were just so delicious. Everybody would come to my house, and if they were hungry, they’d ask if they could have a jar of tomatoes. They would just eat them like that. I used to actually hate fall. I never had hated it until I got married, because fall was the hardest time. Because I had to work, I had my whole family, and then I’d have to stay up till midnight or two o’clock in the morning while they were asleep, and I was still cooking, trying to get this food preserved so that it wouldn’t go bad. I already had my day—when you have a lot of little children and a big family, you have your days full and nobody is going to help you; it is your work. They were too young to help anyway. So I couldn’t wait for it to snow because there was no more food [laughs]. It was physically hard. You would get very little sleep, and you had to get up early in the morning from the middle of August until the first part of October. I’d have hundreds of jars. I would have to buy jars every year because I would make jellies and I’d give them to people that came to my house. Champe and chokecherry and strawberry and apple—we used to get a lot of apples. I used to make apple butter. There was a lot of hard work. You had to buy a lot of sugar, and it was very trying on our budget. But we were getting our foods at prime, prime flavor. It was just something that I needed to do. I just felt like I came to this place with all this food. It was like a mortal sin to let it go to waste. I canned for about five years, but maybe it was longer than that. I can’t really remember. When we first got married we had to can. Ted hadn’t taken care of the house, and we had a lot of payments to make. There was food everywhere, but it would come in abundance at one time. I felt very much in sync with nature then. I don’t feel that as much now. I was in sync with the seasons. You had your babies in the warm months so they’d be warm, and then I felt like I was all summer long preparing for the winter. We would go get our wood during the summer. When all the farmers had food or apricots, then we’d make jelly for the winter. For us it’s not a three- or four-month winter; it’s a very long period. Up until May, and it could start happening in mid-September, winter can start. It is a long time. I was preparing like the little squirrels, getting my stash

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of food in there. We’d get our chile and I would dry it and can it and freeze it. He’d get his elk—we get elk in October and September, we cut it, we freeze it. Oh, and then there was this lady in Bountiful, and every year we would get twenty dozen corn. I’d either cut it off the husk to make corn from that, or I’d leave it—the kids liked it as corn on the cob. It would take a lot of freezer space, but we had a lot of freezers to put things in. We had two freezers, and then my mother-in-law had three. Everything was food preparation. It was a lot of hard work.

Earning Money with Food Women’s food preservation and processing not only contributed to the family’s subsistence but also enabled them to participate in exchange relations by selling or gifting food products made at home. All the women whom I interviewed valued their ability to feed and contribute financially to the family, and to control their own expenditures. Many used their food skills to earn money during some periods of their lives. One way that was far more common before World War II than it is today was to work as a domestic or a cook in the home of a wealthy family, as Anna Garcia did while a teenager in the early 1930s. Another way in which women earned money from food was by working in the fields, something that several women remembered doing in the past but few did anymore. Some women in Antonito made money from raising poultry; making cheese, butter, tortillas, or tamales; or working in restaurants. In the 1930s and 1940s, when Ramona Valdez lived on a ranch in Guadalupe with her parents and two siblings, she made queso (white cheese) and butter that she sold for fifty cents a pound. Ramona also raised and sold pigs and turkeys, which brought as much as $7 each. Through these activities she was able to accumulate $800, a lot of money at that time. HELEN RUYBAL ON MAKING AND SELLING CHEESE

Helen Ruybal consistently minimized discussion of her unpaid domestic labor and focused on her remunerated work, whether she was talking about teaching or the work she did in the home, such as making cheese. For ten years, at least ten years, maybe more, I made cheese, white cheese. My husband and my son used to milk at the ranch and bring it from there to town. Cheese was a luxury item, like ice cream on a cake. Ten years, I sold it. I sold it for a dollar, a whole big thing. Sometimes

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I’d make $6, if I took six. Oh, that used to be my job, and I’d use that money for a lot of little things. Even big things, I’d just put it with the rest of the money. That was a job, but I liked the idea. I didn’t work hard. Even when I went to school to teach, I’d leave the cheese hanging and I’d go away and come back and it was all ready to take it out and put it in the pan in the refrigerator. As long as I had the milk, instead of throwing it away, I made cheese. That’s what I did it for more than for an income. But I loved to get the money that I got from my work.

I found out that one local woman still made and sold queso in 2000 when Ramona Valdez bought a cheese and gave it to me. Other women, sometimes with the help of men, made and sold empanaditas, tamales, burritos, or tortillas. Helen Ruybal described Irene George: “She sells tortillas. She’s busy every day making the dough ready. She sells them at $6 a big batch, twelve, I think. They’re big, and they’re good. She hasn’t a living on that but plenty of extra money. I’ll buy tortillas, six at a time. After they’re gone we’ll go on bread, and then if we get hungry for tortillas we’ll just call her again. ‘Bring us six.’ Before you know it, she’s at the door with six, real warm.” Helen told me about another local woman, Flora Romero, who was renowned for planning, cooking, and catering the food for weddings and funeral dinners (see Chap. 9). In addition to preparing food for events, several women made money through restaurant work. Women owned two local restaurants, Dos Hermanas and the Dutch Mill Cafe, and they catered weddings and parties as well. Other women in town worked as cooks, dishwashers, or servers in restaurants, like Carmen Lopez, Janice DeHerrera, and Monica Taylor. The following work histories give a sampling of the wide array of food-related jobs women carried out, both inside and outside the home, showing how their work blurred the boundaries of public and private, production and reproduction. RAMONA VALDEZ ON WORKING IN THE FIELDS

Eighty-one-year-old Ramona Valdez reported on her family’s small-scale cash cropping in the early 1930s. I remember one time, the last time that I was at the ranch that I can remember, they had a lot of potatoes and they were cutting them in quarters, where there was an eye, for seed, and they planted them. I would say I was about twelve or thirteen. I worked in the fields, too.

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First of all, my father had a Japanese man that rented the land. He’d plant cauliflower and cabbage. The cauliflower, when it’s about two inches in diameter, you tie it so it won’t get yellow. That’s what we’d do all day. Tying it the right size. They knew how many days to leave it, and then they’d cut it and be ready to market it. Then my brother took over and he planted cauliflower. He’d make them on the hotbeds and then transplant. The hotbeds were quite long, with boards, like a frame. Then we scattered the seeds. We watered them, then pulled them out and transplanted them. I worked on sorting the plants. My brother also planted peas. There were a lot of workers, and I paid them. It was twenty-five cents then for a basket. Can you imagine? It’s hard work!

Inspired by Japanese American farmers who came from California at the urging of San Luis Valley land companies, vegetable production burgeoned in the San Luis Valley during the 1920s. As Carlson (1973, 99–100) wrote, “The success of the Japanese Americans turned other Valley farmers increasingly to the irrigated production of highly perishable vegetables such as lettuce. The vegetable area increased from only 53 acres in 1919 to 10,000 in 1929. . . . Other vegetables included cauliflower, carrots, spinach, garden peas, and cabbage.” This cash-crop farming led to the rise in seasonal wage labor among many Mexicanos, men and women alike (see Taylor and Taggart 2003). CELINA ROMERO ON WORKING AS A COOK AND FIELD HAND

Celina Romero, born in 1920, worked as a field hand in her teenage years and later, after raising fourteen children, as a cafeteria cook. At fourteen years old I used to pick potatoes. I used to hoe and weed lettuce rows and sugar bean rows, half a mile, a mile long, and I used to take thirty to thirty-five hampers of peas a day. I was just interested in it. I didn’t spend my time talking. No matter what work I did I was always faithful to it. One year I told my husband, “You’re going to have to go pick potatoes so we can buy the kids books and clothes.” “OK, let’s go,” he said. When I took him picking potatoes, well, we started real good, and then little by little I kept on picking potatoes and left him behind. He got real tired to where he was crawling picking potatoes. So I’d come back and pick his row, and oh he’d just get so tired. He never did work like that. I was really strong. I still am. I’m very strong. Very, very strong. I started working at forty-one [in 1961] at the

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[school] cafeteria, and then I worked there twelve years, and I went to Head Start and worked there twenty-one years. Oh, I loved it!

Celina Romero transferred her home-based skills of gardening and cooking for a big family into remunerative work as a field hand and school cook. Her age-mate, eighty-one-year-old Anna Garcia, followed a similar trajectory, working as a housecleaner and cook for pay in two homes before marriage, marrying and raising seven children, and then working as a substitute postmistress and finally as cook and cafeteria manager in the Antonito elementary school alongside Celina Romero. Anna’s ability to work depended on her ability to care for her children and get the housework done. She went into and out of the workforce according to her ability to manage it all but remained committed to having a paid job: “I always liked to work, mainly because of the money. You want to have some money of your own—for the family, to fix the house, and there was always something.” Anna Garcia valued working for money but had to balance it with her work at home, a challenge most women faced. They managed by staying flexible, earning money when they could and cutting back on paid work when necessary. ASUNCIONITA MONDRAGON ON RAISING POULTRY AND SELLING EGGS

Seventy-year-old Asuncionita Mondragon showed the close links between her work as a homemaker and her work as a wage earner, links that were typical of many women’s experiences. A decade younger than Anna Garcia, Asuncionita Mondragon made chickens and eggs an important part of her work and income in the first half of the twentieth century. My mother used to have chickens, and in those times you could bring the eggs to town and they’d buy them and then you could buy groceries with the money that you made. She always had about fifty chickens, layers. When my dad was alive he used to bring her to town to do the shopping, but after my dad died my mom didn’t know how to drive. So I had to learn how to drive, and it fell on me—the responsibility of bringing in the eggs to the store. My mother let me do the budgeting and buy the groceries. She had a list every Saturday of what she needed. Whatever was left over she always had a layaway at J.C. Penney’s. So she always sold eggs, twelve dozen, sometimes fourteen, depending on how much she would use during the week. With any leftover money she

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used to buy savings bonds for us—savings stamps—they were stamps, and after so many books you had a bond. She gave them to me after I got married. She said, “You can buy some furniture if you need some.” [After I married] I made a garden two years. When we moved here we had water; we had a water hose so we made a big garden, and we were all very energetic. When my husband, Fred, would take off to work he’d say, “Put the water hose in that corner there, then move it this way and then start over there,” and he gave me all these orders about the water hose. Very soon he started telling me, “There’s some weeds in that end. You need to pull a few of them up.” That went on for two years. The third year he says, “Let’s make a garden.” I says, “No, I’m not making a garden.” He says, “Why?” I says, “It just takes too much time. I’m doing the work. I am the one doing the work.” So I says, “No garden.” One day my mother-in-law came in, and she said, “Didn’t you make a garden this year?” I said, “No, no garden.” She said, “With all that good water, and you didn’t make a garden? Boy, you people are spoiled.” I said, “Yes, you have a gardener, but I don’t. I’m not making a garden no more.” And I never did. Well, I was the one doing the work. Surely they all helped plant, but when it came to watering and weeding, I was stuck with the job, and I said, “No more.” My mother says, “Well, what are you going to do for vegetables?” I says, “When I sell eggs”—because I followed my mom’s career— ”when I sell eggs I’ll buy my vegetables, but I’m not going to kill myself out there.” The man who sold us our house left us thirty laying hens. By the time I moved in they were already laying. I’d sell the eggs, and I was buying food and the cabinets were full. By the time we moved into the house I had all kinds of canned goods, cereal, and everything was there. The chickens kept on laying. When I ran out of something I would sell the eggs on Fridays or Saturdays and buy whatever I needed. Every spring I used to get about fifty laying hens. I used to buy the balance in the little cockerels, and I’d make my fryers for the freezer. I think I’d get about a hundred of the little roosters. They don’t all get saved. You lose them. But I had a good number of them in the freezer. At that time chickens were very expensive at the store. We would raise some of their feed, and then we would have to buy some of it.

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You buy the baby chicks [in May]. They’d come to the post office in a square box with a lot of little holes so they could breathe. I would have to keep them in the kitchen for about the first week, and then I’d make a place for them on the porch. I would get a heat lamp to where it’d be warm for them. We had two chicken houses, one where we had the laying hens and the other one where we’d put the young ones. Then in the fall it was time to kill them, pluck them, and dress them. Sometimes I’d get my husband, Fred, to help me kill them, but he was a little smarter than I was. He always had a lot to do, and I was stuck with the chore. I used to do twenty a day for maybe four days. I used to do ten in the morning. I would pluck the feathers and dress them, and I’d right away quarter them, ready for the skillet, and freeze those, and then in the afternoon I’d do another ten. Of course, I never got finished till about six o’clock in the evening. It was a bad week because we didn’t get to eat all that good because I was too busy. I got to budget the egg money, because what Fred used to get from where he worked, he used it on the farm, and to buy gasoline to go work. The egg money was just totally for food, to buy our groceries or whatever was needed, spending money for the kids or whatever. I think it was 48 cents a dozen. Sometime we even paid our telephone bill with it. Our telephone bill in those days was $2.87. [I sold eggs] until the stores got real technical about it, that you had to have them candled and all this red tape, and by that time every Tom, Dick, and Harry in town had a dog and they would go to our place and kill chickens, and I said, “That’s it.” [Later on] I worked part-time at the credit union in the afternoon for twelve years. I liked it, but I thought I had lost a lot at home. I learned a lot. I put my bookkeeping to work. I used to [use the money I earned] to buy our groceries or whatever was needed, spending money for the kids or whatever.

Balancing Work and Home Asuncionita Mondragon revealed how work in the home segued into work outside the home. Raising chickens and eggs brought both food for the family and an income that she controlled and budgeted, allocating it to provide for the children and the household needs. These budgeting skills enabled her to transition to working for the credit union once her children were grown and her domestic duties abated. Almost all the study participants worked for money at various times in their lives, both before

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and after marriage. In this they followed the pattern for northern New Mexico described by Swadesh (1974, 179): “[Women] frequently earn anything from egg money to a full-time wage. . . . Teaching, secretarial work, and nursing are the preferred vocations.” Many Antonito women also held these jobs. Some went into and out of the workforce; others had lifelong careers. Working gave the women satisfaction and their own money. As Cordi Ornelas said, “I was earning money so I could spend it the way that I wanted to because I never felt comfortable asking my husband for money.” TEDDY MADRID’S FIRST PAYCHECK

Sixty-six-year-old Teddy Madrid demonstrated how a job could be a source of pride and fulfillment for women in the following story about events that took place almost half a century earlier. As soon as she sat down at my kitchen table for our third interview, she began. What I really wanted to tell you about was when I was nineteen years old and I got my first paycheck. I went home and told Mom that I was going to Antonito to cash my check, and she said OK. She had no idea what I was going to do. I drove up to Antonito, and I came to Daniel’s market. I walked in and I cashed my check and I went to the meat mart portion of it—and I bought three or four huge steaks. And I bought bread, loaves of bread, and I bought a crate of oranges. My mother had no idea—I had not told her a thing about what I was going to do. Just to show how well my mother knew me, when I walked in the house with the bundles of meat, she had her cutting board out and a great big knife, and the frying pan on top of the stove and a big fire going. She opened up the meat and said, “Oh, good choice!” And she started cutting up the steaks and preparing the steak for us. Then I brought the oranges, and she said, “Who are the oranges for?” I said, “For my sisters.” We had a big crate, and the girls went at these oranges. So we had a grand old supper that evening. That is what I remember that I did with my first check. What stood out was that my mother knew me so well. I think my mother and I thought so much alike, that we’ve got to provide for the family, I think that’s what it was.

For Teddy and many other women in Antonito, providing for the family consisted of economic support as well as nurturance and housework.

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TEDDY MADRID ON BEING A WORKING WOMAN

Teddy Madrid’s response to my question about what it meant to be a professional woman demonstrated that work was not only a source of money. It was also a source of satisfaction and independence. I was meant to be, that is exactly what I say. I must have been meant to be that because in everything that I did throughout my life, I always strived to be the best that I could. And also to do it not only for myself but for others as well. If being a teacher and a professional, if that’s what I was meant to be, then that was it. I think I wouldn’t have done anything differently. I think that my path was cut out for me because my dad really encouraged us. I think he encouraged me in my being so independent. He encouraged all of us in that. I think that my husband, Vincent, is very proud of me. I was always very independent and very daring. I don’t know, if I had married another man, maybe it would have affected my marriage a great deal, but I think with Vincent and me it has worked out really well because we are very committed to our marriage and have really worked at it. We went through some times when maybe if I hadn’t had to go to school, maybe we could have done certain things. But he had his interests, too. He loved hunting. He loved fishing. He loved the mountains. And I love those things too, but I was too busy with the books and with my profession. It is very good not to be dependent on someone. I think so many women are so cowed and so belittled when they can’t rise above that dependency. I think that so many women have to give up so much of themselves—their abilities and their visibility and their ability to vocalize their feelings. I think to a certain degree working gives you a freedom that I think is wonderful. I’m thinking that maybe women today, they seek this. I think that maybe they have liberated themselves to a certain amount. I know that when I got married I was approached a couple of times by my mother-in-law, and she would say, “Well, who has the last word? Don’t you think that the man should have the final word?” Of course, I was so surprised. I thought, “How so? How could it possibly be?” Although I was raised in a family where my father was such a powerful person, you would not think of disagreeing with him. But he would confer with you. He would have dialogue, and he’d say, “Well, would you disagree?”

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[Before we got married] Vincent knew, he already knew, that I was well on my way to do what I was going to do with my career. I suppose we talked about it, but it never dawned on me to say, “I’m going to quit, and you better get yourself a wonderful job because I’m going to be homemaker the rest of my life.” It never dawned on me because I had already determined since the time that I wrote up my own application and sent it; I chose that I wanted to go to Western State. I got accepted. I went. I guess in a sense it never dawned on me to ask Vincent, “Is it all right with you if I’m going to continue this path?” It never dawned on me.

JANICE DEHERRERA ON BALANCING JOB AND HOME

Some people in Antonito felt that a financially independent woman could cause problems in a marriage. Janice DeHerrera gave up working when she got married in the early 1980s and moved from Albuquerque into her husband’s home in Antonito because she felt that taking on three stepchildren and adjusting to her new husband would be difficult enough challenges. Oh, my God. I knew I was like an adventurer, and I was all ready for an adventure. I was really excited the whole time, but then reality came in and I felt like a live-in housekeeper. I was at someone else’s house taking care of everything. It started getting pretty awful, and the first year was really, really horrible. I had finished college [at UNM] and then I had a career and I was doing all this stuff. . . . But then I come here [to Antonito], and there was nothing to do, nothing of cultural interest. It was very, very hard to adjust, and I had to do a lot of the adjusting because this was his house—I moved into his house, his children, his domain, their domain, and then I had to carve my life in there and it was kind of hard. I knew that if I worked we would have problems of dominance, over the money, and that was the real reason why I chose to stay home. Because I had been in charge of my life around this time, and I would probably be too bossy, and we’d have issues and fight over where the money was spent, over where my money was spent. I didn’t want to get into that, because we were already having enough trouble with all the other things—with [his children] getting used to me and having a mother, and making a household—and so I decided to give up, to be more submissive to that, and allow him to be the breadwinner. Then it would be our money; it would not be my money and his money.

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Fifteen years later, Janice’s situation was different. Her three daughters had grown up and moved out, her sons were older, and the workload at home had diminished, so Janice went back to work. I was really happy because I needed it. I was incredibly bored and sad, and my family job was done, pretty much, and I didn’t want to be no more a slave to the house, even though I still am, but I need a lot of mental stimulation. I think that my life is more than just taking care of people, just being a house cleaner and cook. I have more to offer and show. I have always been a creative person, and I have to be creative. I have a little money, but I don’t make that much, so it doesn’t go that far. A lot has changed because now I am working. Before I could put all of my energies into them [the family]. They missed it at first; it was really hard for them to adjust. They wanted me to work and put out the same level of energy on the house. It doesn’t happen.

Like Helen Ruybal seventy years earlier, Janice struggled to balance housework, family needs, and a job. Many Mexicanas crisscrossed the domains of production and reproduction in multiple ways, trying to find a satisfactory balance between earning money and taking care of the home, between financial independence and fulfilling family expectations.

Conclusion Antonito women explicated a range of attitudes about proper gender roles that varied according to family, life cycle, and personal preferences. From Helen Ruybal’s tenacious clinging to work and idealized vision of gender equality to Monica Taylor’s proud description of the tough women in her family, Antonito Mexicanas showed their determination to develop themselves as people and not be subjugated to men. They supported Coltrane and Valdez’s (1997) challenge to stereotypes about patriarchal Mexican Americans and their finding that many factors influenced family gender relations, including spouses’ work, education, and income. They claimed, “Gender relations are more egalitarian than the traditional model assumes” (230). My subjects bore this out. Women’s work histories revealed that skills learned in the domestic realm surrounding food were often a stepping-stone to paid public work. They learned how to work long, hard hours under time constraints at the end of the summer to preserve food before it rotted. Through gar-

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dening they developed physical strength and knowledge of plants that they applied to work in the fields at planting and harvest. At home they learned to plan meals and cook, which enabled them to be successful workers in school cafeterias and restaurants. They learned to budget and organize, which served them in the workplace. They valued paid work and often used the money they earned to buy food for the home. They went in and out of the workforce according to the needs of their families. Their experiences and narratives revealed that the boundaries between the public and private realms were flexible and permeable, with women constantly crossing back and forth—not without struggle but always with the conviction that work in both domains was important. Most people in Antonito valued women’s contributions to family and community past and present. Teddy Madrid projected an affirming view of women: “I think women should be empowered because they have all the resources within their minds and their hearts and their souls to be able to contribute to society. And to the family.”

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6

“It’s a Feeling Thing”

Cooking and Women’s Agency

Cooking and Agency This chapter looks at a major part of women’s work—cooking—to examine their agency and power.1 I define agency as purposive action expressing freedom. Following Antonio Gramsci, I see agency as the process of making a life and making a self.2 It is the ability to have an impact on the world in multiple ways—sometimes resistant to power structures, sometimes complicit with them (Ahearn 2001, 113). Because it is about freedom, “agency is critical to the concept of cultural citizenship: it reflects the active role of Latinos and other groups in claiming rights” (Flores and Benmayor 1997, 12). Women in Antonito have had diverse relationships with cooking that reflect agency with regard to deciding whether, when, what, and how to cook; how much effort to devote to it; and how much of it to delegate to husbands, children, paid workers, or female relatives. Women have usually valued cooking, whether or not they shouldered it themselves, but it has represented challenges to their agency. It has stood for all the domestic chores that were defined as their responsibility, whether they

wanted them or not. It has presented burdens that they have had to discharge and the potential oppression of gender expectations that they could skirt but never totally escape. TEDDY MADRID’S COOKING ADVENTURES

Sixty-six-year-old Teddy Madrid, the second oldest of nine children, told several stories about cooking that revealed how integral it is to women’s role. My attempts at cooking in my mother’s kitchen were pathetic. My dad and mom were gone, so I decided to try my first cooking experience. I got this recipe, and it called for six onions, six, six onions. So I thought, “We’re going to have fried onions.” I should have figured it out, what to do with the onions. It was onions and corned beef. I had no corned beef. I had a can of corned beef. It said that you slice the six onions, slice them and then fry them. OK, so I fried them in the skillet. I followed the recipe; it was this great big platter of fried onions. So great, I counted my sisters. I was preparing food for them. Then I got the corned beef. They used to like it cold. Well, I went and I mixed the corned beef with this big mess of onions. I sat them all down and we ate. I said, “They’re good. You eat them now. You eat the corned beef and the onions.” A lot of it is the way you cook things and, I found out, in the way you present them to people, the garnishing, and so on. A can of corned beef and this big ton of onions was not exactly what they had in mind. So I put the recipe book away, and I said, “Eat.” I got sick, and the rest of them would not eat. So that did not work at all. When my dad and my mom came home, they said, “What did you feed the girls?” “Corned beef.” “And onions!” they said. “We wouldn’t eat them.” That was my first attempt. My second attempt was even more tragic than that. Yes. I got this recipe, and it was for beef stew. It said, “Cut the beef.” Of course, we had mutton. So I browned the mutton and I put it in to boil, put in the potatoes, put in the carrots that my momma had, from the garden, cut the green beans, and I chopped a little bit of onion. I had this big great pot of this stew that was boiling. It would have been fine if I had left it at that, but it called for stock. I said, “What could stock be?” I was young, very young. “What could stock be?” I looked at my mom’s things and thought it could be wheat, some kind of wheat.

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Could it be mother’s Wheatina? So it called for two cups of stock, and two and a half of oats—and I put it in. And then it dawned on me. I looked at it—and the girls said, “You ruined it!” Because the meat was cooked, all the potatoes were cooked, the carrots were cooked—can you imagine “Blop, blop” that I was going to serve them. They said, “Oh Teddy, you did something wrong.” Margie said, “You did something wrong. You shouldn’t follow recipes.” My mother barely followed recipes. I said, “Oh, what can I do? I did something wrong.” I ran to Aunt Josie down the road where my maternal grandmother lived. I ran all the way down there. I said, “Aunt Josie, Aunt Josie, what did I do wrong?” She said, “Why?” I said, “I fixed the stew.” I took my recipe to her, “I fixed the stew, and what is stock?” She said, “It’s like a beef broth. If you don’t have it you just use water. What did you do, Teddy?” I went away. I would not tell her what I had done. I would not tell my mom what I had done. I wouldn’t tell my mom and dad when they came home. I took the blob that I had made, and I took the pieces of meat out, and I washed them and gave them to the girls to eat. Then I got the blob. My dad raised pigs. I walked way over there and fed this stuff to the pigs. Oh, they loved it. Well, let me tell you another attempt at cooking. It was my mother’s birthday and they were gone. I told the girls, “I am going to make my mother a cake, a birthday cake, for when she comes back.” They all held their heads to watch. They really looked up to me, the girls did. When my mom and dad were gone, I was there. I cooked for them; I tried to cook for them. My sisters say now that there was never a dull moment when I was in charge. So this attempt was my mom was going to have a birthday cake for her birthday. I remembered how she made her homemade cakes. I baked the cake, and the cake came out great. Then she had powdered sugar, and I asked Margie, “How does Mother make powdered sugar frosting?” Margie said, “She uses milk and butter.” So we powdered it and fixed it up really nice. Then I said, “It doesn’t have any decorations!” So I looked and my mother had oranges. So I peeled an orange, and we put orange slices all over her cake. When my mom came she had her cake. She was real pleased to know that attempt. Those were my attempts with the family. After that, I pretty much stuck to the basics, like frying, what I had seen, some of the things my

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mother had, basic things, like cooking beans and potatoes and things like that.

Teddy’s narrative about cooking revealed links between food and female identity. She described the need to know how to cook, the challenges of learning, the shame of failure, and the pleasure of success.

To Cook or Not to Cook Antonito Mexicanas’ stories revealed a rich, diverse, and flexible set of roles and self-definitions surrounding cooking and contribute new data to understanding Mexican American women’s domestic roles.3 To be sure, in Antonito women felt responsibility for cooking and did it more than men on average, but there was strong evidence of some men’s longstanding participation in cooking and of some women’s minimization of its importance in their lives. Very often in families some daughters helped with cooking and others did different chores. For example, in her youth, seventy-five-year-old Cordi Ornelas, the oldest of seven children, took care of the garden while her sister Martha helped with the babies and her sister Marvene helped with the cooking. As soon as she graduated from high school, Cordi worked full-time at J. C. Penney’s to bring in an income for the family and did few household chores. She told me, “As a matter of fact, I didn’t learn how to cook until I got married.” When Cordi’s mother died, her younger brother Joe Taylor was only thirteen and had to learn to cook, joining many men in Antonito who were skilled at the stove (Taylor and Taggart 2003). In sixty-six-year-old Teddy Madrid’s natal family of seven daughters and one son, the eldest child, Lorraine, helped with cooking, while Teddy, the next oldest, usually did the traditionally male chores of hauling water, chopping wood, killing chickens, and feeding pigs. Forty-five-year-old Janice DeHerrera grew up in Albuquerque with a passion for preparing food, but her sister, she said, “was not into cooking.” Mexicanas in Antonito held many different responsibilities and attitudes toward cooking, exhibiting personal preferences and flexible adaptations to family needs across their lives. Yet, in spite of a great deal of variation, for many Mexicanas in Antonito and across the Southwest, cooking was an important activity.4 They were under some pressure—both self- and other-induced—to cook, as Teddy Madrid’s, Helen Ruybal’s, and Janice DeHerrera’s stories revealed. Whereas forty-five-year-old Janice enjoyed cooking and used it as a channel for creativity, sixty-six-year-old Teddy downplayed her

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cooking and domestic roles in favor of her professional identity as a teacher. But after she retired from teaching, she took responsibility for cooking for her husband, Vincent, their divorced son, Tony, and his two teenage sons, who lived next door. Ninety-four-year-old Helen Ruybal never embraced cooking. “I’m not really a kitchen guy, you know what I mean, a provider in the kitchen,” she said. In the photograph of her kitchen, the kitchen table has been turned into a desk, and there is no evidence of cooking except for the coffee pot. As if to justify escaping the kitchen, Helen often remarked that she was a haphazard cook. One day she came to visit and brought a gift of bread she had just made, saying, “Is it good? I thought it was kind of good. Sometimes it doesn’t come out right. I’m not a good cook [laughs]. I’m not a steady cook. Sometimes my bread comes out soggy, not very good.” On another occasion she spoke about making homemade tortillas, which she and everyone else thought were far superior to store-bought ones, but she acknowledged her uncertain success: “Sometimes I make tortillas. And sometimes they come out good, and sometimes they don’t, not so good. Oh, well.” HELEN RUYBAL’S AND HER SISTER’S DIFFERENT APPROACHES TO COOKING

Helen Ruybal did not claim food work as an important activity for herself, but she admired her husband for doing it and also praised and valued her sister’s excellent cooking.5 I never cooked you know, and I still don’t. I was always a bookworm. Ever since I was growing up. When it was time for the dishes, they couldn’t find me, so my poor sister had to do them by herself. When I thought the dishes were half done or done I’d pop up. I never was responsible for them, they never depended on me, and my sister was such a good cook. She was a good cook, and she griped about me not taking turns on the dishes, but she didn’t fight; she didn’t mind; she was so grown up on the job, it was natural for her. My mother and my sister did the cooking, and I always used to get away from that. I was so busy. My sister was just a housekeeper, and she had six children. She cooked and she baked. She would cook a lot of pies, six or seven, and we all ate all those. They were so good, and they smelled good, and you could take them home if you wanted to, and we always wanted to. When her son Tim came from the army—he was the youngest of the family—he used to call her when he started toward the

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Helen Ruybal in her kitchen.

house here. He said, “Don’t forget the jelly roll. I’m coming back this afternoon.” She would get down and make it in no time. She would just make a big batch of dough and spread it thin, over a wet dish towel, and then put lots of jelly. And then with the dish towel she kept rolling it until the end. Then she had a jelly roll by the time Tim went to the house. All of them knew what they were going to eat. Even if it was beans, she would cook them so good, with meat, and with chicos. But her children still remember the jelly rolls. They came out perfect, like the ones in the store. We never got mad at each other, and we never got into a fight. Everything she did I agreed to it, and everything I did, which was not much compared to her, we were glad. We were agreeable. We weren’t grudging against each other. Everything went smoothly, and if it didn’t go smoothly, it came out smoothly. You forget about the bad and go on with everything, and before we knew it everything was good. She had such a good heart, and she was a good cook; she was a good housekeeper. With my sister, we were a perfect match. My sister Lila was my right hand; she raised my kids. I’d come from my home, one mile, and I’d leave my kids there. What they didn’t have, they had it there, and what they had they used it. She took care of them, fed them, and cleaned them up, and when I came in the evening I visited

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with her, and I picked them up, and I went home. We got along fine until she died. We were in favor of each other always, since we were growing up. If it was for my side, she’d go out of her way to do it, and I’d go out of my way to appreciate it. I gave her a lot of things. If she needed $20, I gave it to her. I always would give her every gift like that, any amount. And she would accept it. I had a good job in the first place, and I had less children, and more money, more money coming in. I was working and couldn’t miss a day, and she never earned money. She just cooked, and washed and ironed, and took care of her kids and my kids.

By accepting gender variation—in this case, regarding cooking—Helen and her sister both benefited. By respecting each other’s differences and cooperating, they were both better off. JANICE DEHERRERA’S COOKING EXPECTATIONS

Whereas Helen Ruybal minimized cooking in her life, Janice DeHerrera explained how important cooking was after she married her husband, Ted, and became stepmother to his three children. My husband put it this way—he doesn’t care about anything except to have the supper when he walks in the door. He don’t care about laundry, a dirty house, unswept floors; the only thing he cares about is he has to have that dinner. So I knew what my focus had to be. I kind of thought of cooking as part of my role—of me being a woman. We were definitely playing roles—the traditional roles—we didn’t have a modern marriage even though we came from a potential of that. But we had so much responsibility that this was the easiest way for us to go through that period of time that we had to go through—by doing our roles. Now that my family is smaller and I’m working, we’ve gone back to a more modern role, which is equal, so sometimes he makes the food now. I thought that it was a terrible, terrible thing to have lunch meats in the refrigerator. I thought lunch meat was just to have if you were going to the mountains and you weren’t going to have a place to cook. Then I saw that my sister-in-law would feed her kids out of a cooler because they were going back and forth to school in Alamosa and maybe no one knew when to eat. They would have chips, white bread, and lunch meat for every meal—Monday through Friday. Then Saturday and Sunday they stayed home and she would make arroz con pollo [rice with chicken] with tortillas and sopaipillas, and she would do all her

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good cooking then. My husband, Ted, told me how she’d make these grandiose meals and said, “Why can’t you make those grandiose meals?” I used to make grand meals but not grandiose. I said, “Because she only has to cook two days out of the week. I guess I could do grandiose meals if I only had to do it two days out of the week.” Then I had a [Chilean] dance instructor, and she said, “I’m going to bring a lunch to you guys on a certain day.” She brought us cold cuts, Oscar Meyer, and I was really disappointed. I said, “Oh, this is what working women do.” I was all thinking that she was going to make something from Chile, something exotic—and I was all disappointed. I said, “Well, I don’t have to be so strict in my thinking.” So now we have Oscar Meyer weenies and cold cuts in our refrigerator, and the boys make sandwiches when they have that can’twait-for-the-meal hunger.

Cooking, Self-Expression, and Emotional Connection Janice DeHerrera had high standards for her cooking, which placed a heavy burden on her that she only gradually relaxed as the years went by and she learned from other women’s examples. She felt that cooking was drudgery when it was routine and compulsory but a great satisfaction when she had time and could be creative. JANICE DEHERRERA ON CREATIVITY AND COOKING

When we have holidays, when I make a lot of different things and we have many courses, I get a lot of satisfaction. On occasion, if I’m allowed to be creative—my mind changes from one slot to another, my brain, totally creative, I’m really into it, and I’m getting pleasure. It’s something chemical almost, because I’m creating, it has to be something I thought up. Something I didn’t get from anybody else. I’m trying this out. Then we unveil and then see the reaction. So I do see it as an artist; I’m an artist then, and that’s when I get a lot of satisfaction and happiness from creating. I do get satisfaction when they appreciate because they come in; they stand by the door and they look. I know if they’re looking, that means they’re really interested in what’s going on, because it smelled good or they’re excited about what’s going to happen. When I first got married I was always an excellent cook, and I had gotten that reputation. Not only did they see Ted getting big [laughs]—I

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must be an excellent cook—but if I had ever made anything, like pies, cakes, or bread or something, that was given to the public or at parties, at a potluck or whatever, I got my reputation as somebody who would bring something interesting to eat. I had broccoli-cheese casseroles and pasta salads. I was making pasta salads before people knew what pasta salads were. Stuff like dump cakes.6 Or at school, my favorite thing to take, during Earth Day and Halloween, was the chocolate pudding with the crumb cake on top. It’s called dirt cups. Then you put gummy-worms inside the pudding so when it comes out, it’s like an earthworm. So I had gotten a reputation that way. I am always trying things out that I hear or read about. People around me get exposed to that. Usually what I make becomes something they make. I find it at all the parties. Then it’s time to figure out something else. I’m one who believes in thrilling, having a thrilling meal. If everybody’s doing what you’re doing, then it’s time for the creative person to have a new thing for them to get. I’m really happy when I cook, if I can cook creatively. The satisfaction comes when I do things on my own from what I feel like. I know “feel like” doesn’t probably mean the same to you as it does to me, but I feel like I need something. Or I feel like I didn’t need this. I feel like I have to make this or I have to create this. Or I feel like I see something and it needs to be used. It’s a feeling thing, a feeling, it feels like in here, right in here.

Janice patted her belly as she talked about the emotional meaning of cooking and emphasized the special connections created through cooking and feeding.7 JANICE DEHERRERA ON COOKING AS EMOTIONAL COMMUNICATION

Janice had many stories about cooking as a form of communication, especially the Sunday meals she used to prepare for her family when she was a teenager. Cooking good food, presenting it beautifully, and sharing it with others were powerful means of attaining emotional connection, creative fulfillment, and admiration. It seems like people would always come over when I was cooking, and I had that—I don’t know if it was a God-breath or a God-sensing or a God-send—but people would come over when I had those meals and then they couldn’t believe that I had made it and I would get a lot of praise. I was probably fifteen and my brother-in-law Tom’s grandma

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had died. His grandpa was coming over to visit our family, but we didn’t know it. Tom just brought him over as a surprise. Probably they had known I would make food that day, but he had come early, and he had stayed a long time talking with my mom and dad. He was very lonesome, and Tom, my brother-in-law, loved his grandpa very much. He was raised by his grandpa. His grandpa was there for him—his male figure. He brought his grandfather because he was concerned he wasn’t eating; he was depressed and all that. So he brought him over. I made this dish that I had seen in a magazine, and I was going to do it exactly like it looked, and it was in a casserole and it was spaghetti. But you had to make the sauce from scratch, and you had to put it in a casserole. And then it had these little cheese X’s, X’s like diamonds all across the thing. Then in the middle, it had an olive in each little diamond. You know how they display it in the magazine? I was going to make that exact thing, and when I saw that dish, I thought it was the most beautiful dish I had ever seen. I looked at the ingredients with the directions and said, “I think I can do this.” I made a salad and garlic bread and made this lemonade and made that casserole thing. It was taking a long time for me to do this. It was really a hard one. They kept coming in, “Are you almost done?” You know like starving people smelling the food, like it was getting close to that time, and we ate at the time on the clock. They were making excuses for me that I was taking so long, how many hours I was in there. So finally it was on the table, and I called everybody. Oh, I had to set the table. I never did anything, even as a child, I never did anything with plainness. I had to have the good dishes and the napkins where I placed the forks and go probably even cut the flowers from the outside. So always for me cooking was an event. So Tom’s grandpa had not eaten for days, I guess. They said they had never seen him eat that much. The grandfather ate all his food, and he was all happy. My brother-in-law said to me—he’s way older than me, eight years older—he hits me on the head: “My grandfather loved that food; it was really good. He hadn’t eaten for days, and he ate more food than I’d ever seen him eat in his whole life.” My brother-in-law was the only one who ever told me he liked my food to my face. I was just amazed. It was like, wow. Is it that important? It gave me satisfaction that I was glad that I had made that.

Janice DeHererra and other women received positive social recognition by cooking good dishes for their families and for a wider social group at

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parties and potlucks. This enabled them to move beyond the taken-forgranted nature of cooking and transform it into a creative and emotionally powerful agent of connection. CORDI ORNELAS’S PAELLA

Cordi Ornelas told me that she didn’t learn to cook until after she married because, as the eldest daughter, she had gone out to work to help support her family. She did not think she was a skilled cook but had attained a reputation on the basis of her specialty, Spanish paella, which she learned from one of the Theatine fathers during the years she was parish administrator. I worked with the priests. They were mostly Spaniards, and one of them, Father Nadal, was a really good cook, so I learned to make paella. Now mostly everybody wants paella for their birthday! He said his sister taught him. He gave me the ingredients. We made paella twice. I learned it because it wasn’t that hard—I don’t have a recipe. He gave me a list of the ingredients—I still have it there, the ingredients that he used. I’ve added some. Where he used the canned mushrooms, I use the fresh, and where he used the can of peas, I use frozen. My family thinks I am a very good cook, and so do my married sisters, too. I think that my sister Marvene is a better cook than I am. But she doesn’t dare make a paella. I don’t see what’s so different about it, or what’s so hard. Then her boy wanted to learn how to make it. So he videotaped me, making a paella.

Cordi added her own touches to the recipe, what Abarca (2004, 4) called chistes, expressions of individual creativity and agency. Eighty-one-yearold Ramona Valdez rarely cooked; most of her meals were provided by the Antonito Senior Center, but she made a big bowl of chile caribe one day and gave it to my family and me. Ramona gave us so much that we had plenty to share with others who came to eat at our house. They in turn appreciated and told others about Ramona’s generosity and skill, an example of what Sutton (2001, 47–49) called “witnessing.” This was a key means of constructing value for women and their work by elevating cooking from routine drudgery to a valued social contribution. Women cooked, added their own touches to recipes, developed signature dishes, and gave food gifts as part of expressing agency.

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Learning and Teaching Cooking Women’s stories about learning to cook described complex processes of self-development that might involve instruction from or observation of other women, cookbooks, or experimentation. In Janice DeHerrera’s case, recipes and personal exploration were central. JANICE DEHERRERA ON LEARNING HOW TO COOK

Janice’s interest in food started when she was very young and discovered the potential of cooking as a form of creativity and connection. How I started was, my mother told me one day, “If you have a cookbook, you can cook anything.” I guess I learned to cook a little bit from my mom but not really because she was like the Lone Ranger. She just did everything on her own. We were spoiled. Well, we had our chores to do, but the cooking was her thing. We had to clean up, but I would say that I learned how to cook from a cookbook. On Sundays I would cook for the family. That started when I was twelve or thirteen. My sister would bring home these great books from school from home ec classes she’d take. She would get these really nice Carnation books or cookbooks published by manufacturers of soups and stuff. I used to love those books. They’d have pictures in them, and I would go through the pictures and say, “This looks good.” Then I would show my dad because he was the boss of everything. I would tell him, “I want to make this—don’t you think this looks good, Dad?” Even if he didn’t like it, he would say yes. Then he said, “Well, next week when we go get groceries we’ll buy stuff and then you can make it next week. Write a list of all the ingredients.” So I would start right after lunch, after church, and it would take me the whole afternoon to make the food that I picked out in the cookbook. When you are little you just do one thing and then you go to the next thing. You don’t know how to multitask. You don’t have it cleaned up as you go along; it would be a wreck. My mom would be a little bit upset, but then Dad would make me go help clean the dinner. I would leave the kitchen a wreck, a wreck with this grand meal that was decorated. I would even decorate it like I’d see in the book with garnish and the whole thing. So that is how I got into cooking. Another reason I learned to cook really good at home was that my dad didn’t like to go to restaurants. To treat him special—I was always

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trying to make my dad happy. He would love it if I made him something different, like egg rolls or something like lobster or crab legs or something that he didn’t eat, that my mom didn’t know how to fix. That was a way I could treat my dad good, and we wouldn’t have to take him out in public and embarrass us everywhere we go [laughs]. He would love it and tell everybody about it like he had gone to the finest restaurant. So I guess that my dad was kind of my motivator. But he would never tell me. I always had to find it [out] through other people, because if you give your kids too many compliments, it goes to their head I guess. I don’t know what the deal was there. I would say I watched my mom.You learn a lot from watching, but you don’t use it until you have your own responsibilities. My mother was highly efficient and did everything herself. I am a little bit like her sometimes, too. It is better to do it yourself than have everybody in your way in the kitchen. You’re like, “Get out of here, you’re just in my way, you’re slowing me down.” You get everything all synchronized. I have it sometimes where I am so synchronized that if somebody gets in my way it will mess me up somewhere. I might forget an ingredient if I let that happen. I learned from my mom in that way, and my daughters learned. They watched me. They’d be doing their homework, and I’d be doing my stuff. Then when they went on their own and got their boyfriends— women want to cook for men I guess. They were really impressive to their friends and their boyfriends. Then they went off on their own, experimenting like I did with different cultures. Anna, the oldest, has a reputation for being a great cook. That’s because she tried out all the stuff that I used on them and that I cooked for her, and she got a lot of raves and that encouraged her. Felicia wasn’t as much into it, but she can cook because she watched me—they all watched me. Claudine didn’t as much because she was into sports and stuff, but the other two girls, they loved watching me. It was really funny because I’d hear people say, “Oh, she makes the best quiche. Oh, she does this. Oh, the egg rolls” [laughs]. They didn’t know what I would say, they were impressing others with my food. Then, see, that’s really funny because the first year that I got married, every meal I heard, “What’s that? What’s that? What’s that?” [laughs]. It was like I cringed, hold on to the table: “What’s that?” They didn’t know. I introduced them to broccoli; I introduced them to Brussels sprouts; I introduced them to alfalfa sprouts, pita bread, avocados. They didn’t know what quiche was; they didn’t know what crepes were. They didn’t know, they hadn’t had exposure. Oh, but I didn’t tell you that when I first

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got married, I used to use a wok, and everybody at the school wanted to meet me because the youngest one said, “My mom does this, my mom does that, my mom does this.” That was all centered on food.

MONICA TAYLOR ON LEARNING TO COOK AND THE FAMILY BISCOCHITO RECIPE

Whereas for Janice DeHerrera much of family life and work focused on food preparation, for other women it was less important. Monica Taylor learned to cook not from cookbooks or from watching others but in forced instruction from her female elders. She enjoyed the life of a tomboy until she turned seventeen and her grandmother and her sisters, whom Monica nicknamed “the witches' quorum,” decided it was time to socialize her into women’s roles, especially cooking. At the end of that year, her grandmother rewarded her by giving her the secret family biscochito recipe.8 I didn’t learn how to cook actually until I was about seventeen years old. Grandma was getting pretty on in age, and she and her sisters all decided it was time this girl learned how to cook. That’s when the battles began. Oh, yes. Because each aunt was, “No she doesn’t need to make it that way, she’s going to make it this way.” They all had recipes that they had written down because technically they would have done it for quinceañera, something they do when girls are fifteen. Traditionally in other areas I believe it’s called a coming out party. I was not going to have a coming out party at fifteen. I was like, “Oh, no. You’re not putting me up on the auction block.” I was like, “Forget that.” Because I was such a tomboy. My whole life I had ridden horses, I’d climbed rooftops, I’d swung off the trees, I’d herded cattle. Put me in a dress? I don’t think so. But later they did. Why they picked when I was seventeen is beyond me. It was kind of a cool thing because they came to the house, and there again when they came it was all the aunts showing up for a month and a half or two months, three months, and I can remember thinking, “God!” I was ready to pull my hair out. I can remember Tía Amalia, she flew in from California, Tía Concha and Tía Luvigen—no Doloritas—came in from Pueblo. Tía Luvigen of course was here, and then there was Grandma. So it was comical as hell, but I can remember that whole year somebody was shoving a recipe in my face, or bringing me a pair of shoes to wear, or making me a dress. It was amazing. Any-

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way, by the end of that year what consequently started in the fall and thank God ended in spring of the following year, I had learned how to dance, waltz properly. I could wear a dress without being totally bowlegged. I could walk across the floor without falling on my rear end. I could bake. I could make a quilt; I did make a quilt that year. What else did I do? I learned how to get sloshed and be very polite about it [laughs]. But it was cool because at the end of that year I was a good cook. And I got the family biscochito recipe, which none of the other girls got. I guess because I allowed them to torture me through the whole year, they figured I deserved it, because I think that every other grandchild had always asked for that recipe and I am still the only one who has it. They all asked Grandma for it, but Grandma said, “No, you can’t have it.” So when Grandma died, they knew damn well that I had that recipe, Great-Grandma’s recipe from Spain. There was nothing local about it. I’ve still got it. I’ll pick one person when I get ready to croak to have it. That was Grandma’s deal. She said, “You don’t hand this to anybody until you feel it’s time.” By the end of I’d say my junior year, I could cook anything. You had your pasta; you had your baked lamb for traditional seasonal dinners. I could bake any kind of bread—raisin bread, wheat bread, rye bread—cookies. Tía Doloritas used to make some fabulous peanut butter cookies—she’d put raisins in hers. Then Tía Luvigen and Grandma would always make the traditional biscochitos, but then Tía Amalia always made a chocolate chip cookie. So there was a little bit of a variety there—and then of course the tortillas, now that was a fun deal. My great-aunts used to say that a tortilla is like life. Nothing is ever going to be exactly the way you want it to be. However life is, that is how your tortilla comes out. So however you rolled out your tortilla, maybe it wasn’t quite round, but you ate it because you made it.

Monica’s great-aunts taught her how to cook because it was an important skill, and culture and family were embedded in cooking knowledge. As Monica’s great-aunts united to teach her cooking, they taught her about life and values such as that embedded in the dicho about the tortilla, a recipe for agency. Monica’s description of being the sole possessor of the secret family biscochito recipe demonstrated pride and self-determination. Many recipes were an interesting encapsulation of family history, as this one was, recalling the family roots in Spain, part of many people’s conscious identity in Antonito. Janice also had a “secret recipe” from

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her father’s family—sweet rellenos—that reflected family in a different way. Sweet rellenos were fried croquettes made of ground beef, dried fruits, nuts, and chiles. Her aunt always used to make them, and when she stopped, Janice took over the task because they were essential at family gatherings. Janice said that a good hostess put some aside for late arrivals so that everyone would be able to partake of this symbolic food whose consumption renewed family identity.

Cooking and Gender Many women constructed relationships with men through cooking, and their stories underscored the important fact that gender roles surrounding food were not universal or immutable but varied between families and over time. When I asked ninety-four-year-old Helen Ruybal what men wanted in a wife, she replied, “Some of them wanted a good cook, and some of them wanted an outside-money-earning woman to help have a better life.” The women I interviewed demonstrated a broad array of cooking practices in their public and private lives that went far beyond gender stereotypes. Many reported that fathers, husbands, brothers, or sons did some cooking—at breakfast, on weekends, away from home at the sheep camps, or regularly—both in the past and in the present. Older women mentioned that men cooked as often as younger ones did. Eighty-year-old Anna Garcia remembered her husband, Castelar, cooking breakfast for their children when she worked as a cook at the school cafeteria early in the morning. Seventy-year-old Asuncionita Mondragon’s husband, Fred, never set foot in the kitchen, but both her brothers could cook when they had to. Forty-year-old Monica Taylor said, “Every single one of my uncles could bake, and they were good cooks.” Thirty-six-year-old Yolanda Salazar said, “My husband, Anthony, does cooking, too. He is a good cook. He is a very good cook. He knew more than I did when I got married, because he had an older brother, Joe, who would pay him to cook for him—hamburgers and tortillas and everything. So I always say, ‘Eh, thank you, Joseph, for that. My husband is a good cook.’” Helen said that some men cooked, and others did not; some people were jealous and nasty about men cooking, and others approved and said wives deserved the help. Bernadette Vigil described conflicts with her Puerto Rican former husband over the proper way to make rice. He expressed his rage at her and the world by criticizing her cooking and throwing her creations against the wall. This violence permeated their

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relationship and eventually resulted in her leaving him (Counihan 2002a, 2005). The value, respect, and autonomy women did or did not gain from their cooking were important indices of gender power. TEDDY MADRID ON COOKING AFTER MARRIAGE

Teddy Madrid laughingly described her early cooking adventures as a way to demonstrate that cooking was not a high priority over her lifetime. After high school she went to college and became a teacher. After she married she continued teaching during the school year and taking graduate courses during the summer, which took her out of the kitchen and left room there for her husband, Vincent, to prepare food the way he liked, for example, mixing canned pork and beans into the classic Mexicano red chili. Teddy was willing to accept Vincent’s idiosyncratic cooking to encourage him so that he would keep at it, because she recognized that Vincent could choose to cook, but she could not. I thought, “Well, I’ll let him cook what he wants to cook,” and he really literally did. He was free enough those first seven years of our marriage that he could cook. He gradually found out that I wasn’t going to be there to cook a meal at noon, and he gradually found out that my center of attention was not cooking. So that was the way our first few years of marriage were, just getting adjusted to each other, our ways. But it worked out very well. I gave Vincent the freedom to do his own thing. He refused to do anything around the house other than cook, but he became real good at that. I was real happy and pleased with that. Like I say, if I’m not at it, someone else has to be at it. Now, the apricot jelly, let me tell you, I started. I would make it. Then Vincent thought I was too slow making it, and I was too involved in too many things. There were too many apricots, and they were going to waste. The birds were eating them, and he was having to give a lot of them away. So he got busy. He took over making the apricot jelly, and he says of course his is better. I agree that it takes one more chore away from me, so I don’t complain. I am very wise [laughs]. In the summertime Vincent was great. He would go fishing, and then he would clean out the fish, and he and my sister Rica would prepare them—they’d fry them for dinner. He would cook beans and fry potatoes. He loves fried potatoes. He would make specialties—chili—either green or red. He has always liked to put pork and beans in his chili—a can of pork and beans. Both my daughter and my son learned to love the

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pork and beans in the chili. I never had a taste for it, because I wasn’t raised that way, but they were. They loved his chili, and so he always helped with this. Another thing that he would make was biscochitos. He liked that. I started out making biscochitos, and he started making and always trying to improve on them. He makes the best biscochitos. I started out making tamales. I would make tamales the way my mother and my sisters would make them. Then he learned along, and pretty soon he was making tamales. Here is the thing about Vincent. He would learn to do something very well, and then he would go back to his old habits, and he’d say it was too much trouble. He would never keep up with it. The tamales, he did not keep up with at all. So those were some of the things that he liked—preparing the fish, making chili, cooking beans. He never quite learned to make tortillas. Vincent makes beautiful banana loaves and cakes. He does everything, but I tell you it has to be at his will. You can’t just go and say, “Oh, I desire this at this particular time.” But if I will tell him for a certain special dinner that we’re going to have, with plenty of time, he will get me the banana cakes and the banana loaves so people can admire his cooking. But maybe he needs that sense of approbation. I don’t begrudge him that. I mentioned to you that he had said, “I am not particular about my breakfast.” And it turns out he was. It turned out that he is very choosy, very particular. So if I fried an egg and it burst, he was like a perfectionist. We had those iron skillets; we didn’t have Pam in those days. He knew exactly how to fry. So after a few days, he said, “I think that I prefer frying my own eggs.” Here is one thing about me—I am the kind of person who eats to live; I don’t live to eat. I don’t crave foods. I don’t say, “I feel like eating this,” or I don’t say, “I desire this or that.” That’s just the way I am, and he is exactly the opposite. He is always desiring, always craving foods. I don’t think that it was part of his background to be involved with the cooking—only to the extent of saying, “This is what I would like.” I can relate one time when I first found out very rudely that that was his role in the family. I think because they had been raised with a mother, and his father passed away so young, that the boys sort of took over this role of being the managers. We were married ,and we were staying a few days at his mother’s. Really we stayed there longer than we should have. Because we bought the house almost immediately after we got married; I insisted on it. But Vincent did not want to move out [of his mother’s home]; he said our house was not ready. We had to get heating, we had to clean it, we had to paint it.

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Vincent wanted to stay at home, at his house with his mother. I had no business there. I was anxious to get in my own house. He was going to college at that time. We were all sitting at dinner, and we were waiting for him because he had a class and he came in. Vincent’s uncle, my mother-in-law and I, and his two younger sisters were sitting at the table. My mother-in-law would do this: she would prepare many dishes. She’d have beans, she’d have macaroni casserole with hamburger, she’d have maybe a salad, several dishes, and lots of tortillas and coffee and everything ready to go. Vincent came in, and I did not like the way he addressed her. We just did not address our mother that way. He told her, “You did not prepare chili!” And she got up and went to the refrigerator and quickly fried some hamburger and quickly. I don’t know how she made it, but nobody ate; we waited there. She prepared this great big bowl of chili. Then when the chili was ready, we sat down; he sat down to eat. I thought, “Oh, gosh.” I started thinking, and we moved out of there as quickly as we could because I thought, “Oh, if this happens again, I am just not ready to take this.” So one day my mother-in-law said, “It is your turn—we will give you the kitchen, you prepare what you want.” Can you imagine me teaching and I was supposed to come home and prepare for this whole family? So I thought, “Oh, I want to be good.” So I ran down after school and I picked out hot dogs, and I picked out sauerkraut, because my mother would prepare sauerkraut, and I came home and boiled the sauerkraut, boiled it and boiled it, and got it down so that I thought it tasted really good. And I had prepared the hot dogs. They all went, “This is what you’re going to have for supper?” [laughs]. It was sad. It was a terrible experience, and I thought, “Oh, my goodness, why not?” I mean, why not sauerkraut and hot dogs? [laughs]. Years later Vincent remembers, he refuses to talk about it, how they got a taste of what the new bride was going to serve them. Not the traditional Mexican dinner. I was going to do what I could within my limitations as a schoolteacher, a full-time worker. Like I tell you, I am not fixated on food. I know this, the interest that other people take in the preparation of food. I think, really, of all my sisters. I think I am the only one who is not that much interested in it. But I will prepare the food now. I’ve learned that I have to, I have to do it.

Teddy felt shamed by her inadequate cooking compared to her motherin-law’s, even though she justified it by her dedication to her profession

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as a teacher. She showed the difficult situation of women who had to be competent in the house, no matter what else they did. Like all couples, she and Vincent had to negotiate the gender division of labor around cooking, which stood for broader balances of power. That they were able to develop patterns of shared cooking in their marriage that were radically different from her husband’s upbringing was an example of gender role flexibility in Antonito. HELEN RUYBAL ON HER HUSBAND’S COOKING

Helen Ruybal, a full-time teacher for years, defined herself primarily through education and work. She eschewed the housewife role; got help from her mother, sister, husband, and paid helpers; and cooked as little as possible. In Chapter 5 she expressed her egalitarian gender ideals in some detail, and throughout her life she worked as an economic partner with her husband, doing the “pencil work” for their ranching business and earning a steady income as a teacher. Like Teddy Madrid, Helen appreciated her husband’s domestic contributions. She described how he learned to cook in the all-male sheep camps and applied his skills at home, as many men did not. Carlos could cook. Pancakes and sweet bread he would cook by himself. I forget what he put in besides raisins. He would peel potatoes and slice them and fry them, or put them in to cook in pieces and make a soup with potatoes. And meat, he would fry the meat, hamburger. Not too much. And he would put the potatoes cut into little squares. He put in garlic, and things like that, spicy, but he didn’t like too many spices. Carlos liked the soup, and he’d make it easy. He would make things if I was doing something else. If I had company, he would get up and finish something that was started. [He learned to cook at] the sheep camp, where he took care of himself and made food for himself and food for the men. When he was growing up at home he didn’t have to even lift up a spoon because there were ten girls around, and they all did it. [At the sheep camp, Carlos] would cook meals for himself for eight days in the evening, always, because he was a sheepherder. He lived out in the mountains, and it was a nice, happy life. At the ranch he would cook the best fish. We used to go on horseback, our daughter, Carla, and me, our son, Benito, and Carlos, on two horses. And we’d stay there a week up in Blue Lake, and in the mornings he’d get up and say, “I’ll be back for breakfast.” He’d come back with a batch of fish, every morning,

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and he just picked as many as he wanted, and he’d come and fix them, and we had a nice breakfast, fish every morning for a week. He cooked everything there. He would cook when I wasn’t home; on Fridays when I came from school he had supper ready. He did fried potatoes, he did fried beans, and he did everything fried but not [slow-]cooked because he didn’t want to be at the stove watching it. And I helped him, too; we both cooked. And I used to admire him.

MONICA TAYLOR ON THE CHILI WARS

Whereas Helen Ruybal and Teddy Madrid described working out the cooking relationship with their husbands, Monica Taylor was less successful. Monica reveal challenges to her agency through the medium of cooking in an interview during which she decided to include her husband, Charlie. The following excerpt from this interview centered on two important San Luis Valley foods: red chili and green chili. People were passionate about their preference, as Monica and Charlie were. Monica: Oh, what was the other thing you wanted to talk to us about, the chili wars? Oh, God, these poor kids. We should have this discussion in front of Charlie. We had some extreme chili wars. Carole: Maybe we could get your story first? Monica: [laughs] No, let’s get Charlie’s version. [We go outside to find Charlie]. Carole wants to know about our chili, how we used to make chili. Charlie: How we used to make chili? I make chili my way, and she makes it her way. It all depends on the chili you use, whether it’s good or not. Monica: Charlie’s chili was hot. I make mild chili, and Charlie makes hot chili. I always used to make green chili, and I like green chili, but Charlie has always made red chili. So if we’re going to cook, red chili, green chili, I cook, you cook, which one? So when the kids were growing up it was like, “Oh, no, both Mom and Dad made chili!” Maybe they were hiding out in the backyard going, “Oh, my God, these two are cooking at the same time!” Charlie: We don’t cook at the same time. Monica: Not anymore we don’t. Actually Charlie is a pretty good cook. He has taught me how to make a bunch of stuff. Charlie was a single male at that point, and he cooked constantly. He cooked all the meals, and when I came into the picture it was whatever I could figure out to cook.

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Charlie: All you knew how to cook was meat and potatoes. That was all you could cook. Monica: Well, I didn’t starve. Charlie: If we wanted anything with any flavor to it, I did the cooking. Monica: It probably was pretty bland, but that was just the way I was raised. We didn’t have the extras, so we didn’t put them in. That junior year of high school, that was about the only point in time that I really learned how to cook with anything specific. Carole: Did you care about learning to cook? Did you care about being a good cook? Monica: I always wanted to be a good cook because I was always embarrassed because I was out-baked and out-cooked by men. That was another thing in my family, though; women ruled. Women did their thing and heaven forbid that a man should show you, tell you, how to live your life. That was just kind of the way they were. Females were very dynamic in my mother’s family. I don’t know why. I have no clue to this day as to why, because they were all married.

This dialogue revealed a lot about gender power relations. Whereas Monica complimented Charlie’s cooking, he disparaged hers. She expressed embarrassment about her shortcomings, yet in the next breath described the power and independence of her female relatives, expressing her agency by connecting to theirs. Monica’s oscillation between saying she learned to “cook everything” in her seventeenth year with her tías and her lack of confidence in her cooking for Charlie hinted at bigger conflicts in the marriage. A year after this interview Monica and Charlie were divorced.

Conclusion Many women have expressed emotion, intention, and self-activation in cooking and writing or speaking about it. A plethora of female writers have used food as a powerful voice, for example, M. F. K. Fisher, Margaret Randall, Laurie Colwin, Diana Abu-Jaber, Ruth Reichl, and the many voices in Avakian’s collection Through the Kitchen Window.9 Scholars have explored how women in general and Chicanas in particular speak, act, fight, or show deference through cooking.10 Antonito Mexicanas’ stories about food revealed diverse accommodations to the cooking role, along with varied forms of self-expression and agency.

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For women in Antonito, cooking was a cultural imperative that they had to handle one way or another. It could be a powerful voice that expressed creativity and nurturance, or it could represent the burdens of their inescapable domestic duties. Inability to work out a gender balance with regard to cooking resulted in conflict and domination, whereas the ability to mediate differences demonstrated gender balance and women’s agency. Cooking also created the stage for eating, feeding, and the family meal, important channels for expressing identity, socialization, and cultural reproduction, as the next chapter explores.

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7

“Meals Are Important, Maybe It’s Love”

Mexicano Meals and Family

When Janice DeHerrera said, “Meals are important, maybe it’s love,” she got to the heart of the meaning of Mexicano meals in Antonito— their role in fostering family attachments and values. Meals have long been recognized as significant spaces for the reproduction of family and culture. Several recent studies have noted a decline in U.S. family meals and significant negative correlations, particularly for children and adolescents, including poor nutrition, increased risk of substance abuse, lowered academic performance, and increased behavioral problems.1 The nineteen women I interviewed in Antonito did not give evidence of waning family meals but on the contrary asserted their continuing prevalence and offered interesting reasons for their importance. Meals were a significant forum for constructing family and gender, socializing children, expressing emotions, and enacting ideals of behavior for the changing world.

Family in Antonito JANICE DEHERRERA ON FAMILY TIES VERSUS INDIVIDUAL AMBITION

For Mexicanas in Antonito, the family was an extremely important social unit and the center of social relations in their small town. Forty-fiveyear-old Janice DeHerrera opined: Family is super-important because there’s nothing to do here. Everything is centered on raising your children. OK, in the white world, ambition is a very important thing; in this community it’s not, because family is important. So, for instance, you might say this kid has no ambition, he’s lazy, and you don’t understand why the parents don’t get this kid to work. Our reality is that if you push your kids to be geniuses and to work and to do things that are outstanding, that means that kid is going to leave, is going to leave the community. And family is so important that they don’t want their kids to leave, because what’s more important is to be around, to be close by, maybe working in Denver. But they’re not going to say, “H’ito, we want you to be a microbiologist and discover a cure for cancer, and we want you to live in Washington, DC, where we will only see you every two years, and we want you to marry someone from over there, and live your life over there.” We want you to be here; it’s really important, family is so important.

Families in Antonito faced many of the stresses noted for Mexican American families across the United States, particularly poor educational opportunities, high unemployment, domestic strife, and lack of jobs.2 Most of my subjects lived in nuclear family households, but when they talked about family, they included paternal and maternal near and distant relatives across generations. Like those described by Vélez-Ibáñez (1996), Antonito families were important and flexible units of help with home repair, jobs, loans, and all kinds of problems. People cultivated broader affinal and consanguineal ties through food exchanges and ritual commensal events such as birthday parties, anniversaries, funeral dinners, and holidays. In these collective meals, women’s food preparation and distribution gave them an important role in preserving and transmitting Mexicano culture. Family was the basis of identification in Antonito, and countless times I heard adults address children immediately on meeting them, “Who are your parents? Who are your grandparents?” I heard many long conver-

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sations between people defining their kin networks and relation to each other that went back several generations and included scores of named people. Janice said that on meeting someone new, people in Antonito proceeded as follows: “‘Have you met Janice?’ “‘Whose family is she from?’ That’s the first question. So they have your judgments about whether you are an OK family, and they always have that outlook.” Family signified people’s place in the community, their kin alliances, their heritage, and their value. Teddy Madrid said, “Family means security not just in the past and present but also in the future.” But families could also be sources of stress or conflict, as Ramona Valdez said: “There is more envy than unity in a lot of families.” TEDDY MADRID ON HER FATHER’S FAMILY CHARGE

Whether a source of unity or envy, family was a critical social unit, as Teddy Madrid made clear to me in our first interview, when she launched into a long discussion of her family genealogy. Well, Carole, I brought some things to show you, how very much involved our family is together. We have a family reunion once every two years. So every time that we meet together every single one brings an update on the family. I have notebooks and notebooks on this. Each one of the family members gets a copy of everything that we produced. [Teddy displayed a family tree.] These are all roots from my dad and my mom. So you can see from all the different names that are represented there how diverse it has become. And of course our roots run very, very deep. My dad, just before he died, he gave us a charge, a family charge. He put down that he wanted us to be exemplary citizens at all times. That was a charge to be kept. Then he charged each one of us to move forward and continue to live our lives in ways that “your mother and I have tried to instill in you.” And he put down there “in unity and caring for each other and to love each other and to protect each other.” That was his charge.

Mexicano Family Meals Meals provided a forum for ongoing communication and were essential glue for nuclear families.

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MARTHA MONDRAGON ON FAMILY MEALS AND TELEVISION

Thirty-two-year-old Martha Mondragon grew up with her parents and four siblings and still lived next door to her parents, unmarried sister, and married brother. Meals were very important in her natal family and in the family she created. They were a forum for telling stories about the day, planning for the future, and confronting problems. Yet Martha expressed concern that television was a growing threat to meals and family unity. Eating together, it’s just something very, very common when I was growing up, as now, with my own family. It was a time to talk, even growing up. I always remember that we would all share our stories while we were eating. I always remember the Sunday meals especially, I guess maybe because the other days, during school of course, we’d miss our lunch with our families, but Sunday was just a day when we would have all three meals with our family. There was not one meal that we’d skip with my parents. You always sat at the table, whether you just wanted to eat a piece of toast or you didn’t want to eat, you sat at the table. That’s just how it was. It was very important. [Meals are] a time for us to share a lot of what went on during the day, and we find that very important. However, there are times when my son Anthony will just have this dirty habit and—like I say, we’ve allowed it to happen—that he likes to eat on the run, and he likes to go in [to the living room] because he’s watching the TV. We’ve cut off limits to the living room to them. We’ve said, “You need to eat in here with us.” But there’s times that he’ll just want to—when we’re eating lunch or whatever, that he’ll just get up, and he’s looking over the counter to see what’s on TV. If I have to get his attention, I tell him, “You need to turn the TV off, and you need come and eat.” Suppertime is the main time that we’re together. We share a lot of what went on during the day, and we talk or make plans about what we’re going to do throughout the week, or tomorrow, or whatever. Joe finds that very important. Especially where Joe works [in law enforcement], he sees a lot of problems that occur from family members not spending time together. They recently did a study. One of the main problems anymore is that families do not sit down to eat together, and they’re thinking that that’s why so many problems occur in the house. They just don’t take those certain values, like what we used to do when

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we were younger. To Joe, that’s very, very important, and to me also, but just because he’s seen that in his line of work, he sees how very, very important it is for families to sit down. You need to take that time to be together, and sitting at the table is one way to do it.

JANICE DEHERRERA ON THE IMPORTANCE OF THE FAMILY MEAL

Janice DeHerrera also emphasized the significance of meals to the reproduction and harmony of the family and said they were “the most important thing we do.” Her husband, Ted, was a telephone repairman. He traveled widely for work in southern Colorado and northern New Mexico and often arrived late for dinner, hungry as a bear. Janice made sure to have a hot meal ready when he walked in the door and to maintain the tradition of the family meal, no matter what time he arrived, because of its importance “for that feeling of family.” At meals the family sat together around a big, solid, rectangular table in the dining room, which opened to a small kitchen where Janice cooked. The dining room was the center of the house, and the table was a space where the whole family was “in it together” and “surrounded by food.” There was a time when we ate all together, and we’d wait and we’d wait and we’d wait for Dad to come home. Then we’d be eating late. Everybody would comment about how late we’d eat, because sometimes it was eight before we’d eat, and when you consider you go to bed at nine, that’s really late, but I kept doing it because the family needed this time together, and it was a time for the teenagers and the kids and the stepchildren. They’re talking about what’s going on with them. Mostly we’re listening or saying something back—not too much but listening— and they’re telling us of their lives outside of the home. So we would have that—it was really important for that feeling of family, to feel like a family, because when we started eating separately and everybody was doing their own thing, Ted felt like he was just the paycheck or the breadwinner, and he wasn’t part of the family, he was just there. The kids went off in their own little world, and they weren’t sharing. I noticed then after we did that—it was just a very short period, but I could pick up right away that it wasn’t good for the family. So after that we have all our meals together—no matter how late he comes [home]. Sometimes Ted tells me, “Go ahead and eat without me.” That’s usually if it’s going to be past ten. But we hardly ever do that because that’s how you feel like we’re in it and we’re surrounded by food. Yes, we’re

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the unit that’s loyal to each other. We’re here, and we share our meals, but for the rest of the time we’re all in our own little worlds.

Meals rose and fell in size and composition according to the elastic fortunes of family members and their incorporation or loss through marriage, divorce, or migration. Eating with extended family members provided important support in Antonito, where marginal employment opportunities meant resources were sometimes tight, as they were for Janice’s married daughter and son-in-law, whom she fed several times a week. Feeding was also an important way for women to welcome new members into the family. Janice spoke about the period after she married Ted: “My mother-in-law would start feeding us right away when we came in the door.” One way in which Janice built a family relationship with her three adolescent stepchildren was by feeding them. Their opinion of her food was important to her. She said, “When I first got married, my stepchildren were my barometer of success.” After Joe Taylor Jr. moved in with Martha Mondragon, he had to forge a relationship with Martha’s teenage son, Anthony, and deal with the ups and downs of stepparenting. For Anthony’s fourteenth birthday, Joe cooked a big meal for him and thirty relatives and friends. He made hamburgers, hominy, pigs’ feet in red chili, beans with cueritos, green chili, and burritos with pork. Anthony loved to eat, and he basked in the attention he got on that special day. The giving and receiving of foods at daily and special meals could help to overcome some of the tensions in blended families. Because meals communicated nurturing and love, they contributed to positive relationships between stepparents and stepchildren.3 Anthony’s birthday party reinforced extended family connections. Virtually all the thirty people attending were relatives. Present were Anthony’s three sisters; his mother, Martha; and Joe. There were Martha’s parents, Asuncionita and Fred, her sister Dolores, her brother David with his wife and three children, her brother Ernie, and her sister Gloria with her husband and their two sons. Also present were Joe Taylor Sr.; his sister Cordi and her daughter Beatrice; Joe’s brother Bobby and his wife, Orlinda; and his daughter Shanda and her son, Alex. Also present were Roger Romero, a distant cousin of the Mondragons, as well as my husband, Jim, our two sons, and me. The same day as Anthony’s party, we were invited to another birthday party for Yolanda and Anthony Salazar’s son, Dustin. The thirtyodd people there were largely family members—Yolanda’s mother and

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Anthony’s dad and four of his five siblings with their spouses and children. Toward the end of the party, the Salazar siblings and spouses had an informal meeting to plan their upcoming family reunion. They talked for a good half hour about the food. In previous years they had all randomly brought food and ended up with too much. So they had decided to organize the meals, with Yolanda in charge. She read out loud the meals she had planned: hamburgers and hot dogs one night; beans and red chili another; and the last night, “Mexican” pork steaks cooked in red chile sauce. Everyone was pleased with the meal choices and excited about the reunion. What was striking about these parties was the importance of food and family in social events. Commensal feasts brought extended families together regularly, again and again, to eat and share good times. Women were instrumental in these celebrations and played an active role in renewing family and constructing culture.

Meals and Gender Roles Feeding the family was an important channel for enacting gender. In Antonito, as discussed in Chapter 6, there were many different gender arrangements surrounding cooking, more and less egalitarian, which reflected the diversity of Mexicano families noted by many scholars, from relatively patriarchal to relatively gender balanced. Zavella (1987, 13) described and partially debunked the myth of the Chicano patriarchal family model with submissive wife-mother and underlined the “cultural and demographic heterogeneity of the Mexican-American people.” Nonetheless, she found wide concurrence among Santa Clara Valley cannery workers that women were responsible for planning and preparing meals, although working women were able to enlist some help from husbands and children.4 Notwithstanding the variety of arrangements in Antonito families, a strong ethos defined women as the preparers and men as the providers. Helen Ruybal emphasized that her parents insisted she marry a man who worked, not a “streetwalker.” Janice DeHerrera, half a century younger than Helen, said, “Women definitely want providers, provider types. If you see a potential husband for your child, for your daughter, if you see all the men in that family work and get jobs, you don’t care if he’s a lawyer or a doctor. If you see that he comes from a provider-type family, then you’re going to be more willing and more open to your daughter marrying [him].” Defining them as providers meant that men

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had authority in the home, which sometimes translated into control over expenditures that could be problematic for women who did not have their own sources of income, something they all valued (see Chap. 5). When I asked Janice DeHerrera what men in Antonito wanted in a wife, she laughed and said, “They want their meals on time.” Women often explicitly or implicitly aimed at pleasing men with food. Janice said she learned to cook to make her father happy. She also reported a common proverb: “My husband used to say with almost every meal when we first got married, he’d get up from the table and say, ‘Panza llena, corazón contento.’ ‘Full stomach, happy heart.’ In other words, he got enough to eat. That’s the one he would say every day. Until it became jaded.” The taken-for-granted nature of women’s duty to provide meals could be troublesome for them. Teddy Madrid described the shock she received soon after she married when her husband demanded his mother make chili to add to an already lavish meal (see Chap. 6). Her husband’s expectations of his mother were troubling perhaps because she feared she would be subjected to them as well. Women’s responsibility for meals could be a burden, but many families were flexible about gender roles, depending on circumstances. Janice DeHerrera had done all the meal planning, shopping, and cooking for several years, but after four of her seven children moved away and the others got older, she went back to work, and things changed. She made simpler meals; her husband, Ted, shopped and sometimes cooked; and on occasion her sons prepared their own dinners. Martha Mondragon was the mother of toddler twins when she reported a similar flexibility in her household: “Usually, just because with the twins now I’ve been so busy, Joe does the meal planning, I do the shopping, and, if I have time during the day, I do the cooking; if not, he’ll do the cooking. Usually I do the dishes. Now if there are dishes overnight and we’ve had an overwhelming night, Joe will do the dishes in the morning. So it all depends on what kind of a day we’ve had and what kind of an evening we’ve had.” Martha, like Teddy and Janice, welcomed men’s contributions to meals, and some men had always contributed to meal preparation.5 Some women moved away from elaborate, labor-intensive meals to devote themselves to work outside the home, as well as child care, community volunteering, and aiding elderly parents. Like many cultural customs, gender roles surrounding feeding provided both opportunities and obli-

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gations. Janice said that in Antonito pressures on women to conform to expected gender roles in meal preparation were strong. Meals were an important forum for institutionalizing family relations, and when people did not fulfill their institutionalized roles, meals could be a crucible for conflict.6 In describing the breakup of her marriage, one Antonito woman said her husband stopped giving her money for food and only provided her and the children with beans, potatoes, and elk meat, day after day. He stopped eating with them and enjoyed delicious meals with his parents. She described his failure to provide decent meals and eat with the family as the last straws in their deteriorating relationship. Bernadette described how in her marriage to a Puerto Rican man, her failure to live up to his standards for meals became the excuse for abuse (Counihan 2002b, 2005). Another woman in Antonito described a special meal she had cooked for her family and a guest. She cooked everything from scratch, except for tortillas, and her husband had a fit. She was upset about her husband’s failure to appreciate the lavish meal but also excused his behavior by acknowledging that she had not fulfilled the standard set by his mother, who had made homemade tortillas every day. She went on to say that over time her husband became more flexible about what they ate. Her story illustrated the role of meals in the ongoing negotiation of gender roles as families changed. One way in which meals expressed gender was by marking and bridging male and female domains, outside and inside, a division of space also noted by Coltrane and Valdez (1997) in their study of Mexicano families in the border region. Janice suggested that the gender division of space persisted into the present, with the house as the women’s domain and the outdoors the men’s: “Men like to be outside in this community. I haven’t met one yet who will stay inside other than to go to sleep. That’s something that’s unique, but it may be a rural thing. But in our community the men don’t like to be inside. They’re out doing sports, or they’re tinkering with the car. Maybe they’re doing things with their cattle. They only come in to eat.” Another woman who grew up on a ranch surrounded by a large extended family commented that men and women rarely ate at the same table; the women ate in the kitchen, the men in the dining room. If they did eat in the same room for a special occasion, then they sat on opposite sides of the table, an arrangement visible in some old photographs.

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JANICE DEHERRERA ON RESTAURANTS, HER FIRST COMMUNION, AND FAMILY GENDER POWER

Janice DeHerrera recalled that as a child she was aware of how feeding and eating reified gender power relations in the family. The mother served the food, and the father sat at the head of the table and ate first. The big table in the kitchen or dining room was the emotional center of the house where male authority was symbolically reenacted. She recognized that the seating arrangements at her First Communion restaurant dinner were an exception that underscored the rule of patriarchal power.7 My grandmother went to my First Communion, and then they decided to take me to a restaurant, called the Hacienda restaurant, in Old Town, the oldest part of Albuquerque. We went to this restaurant there, and we had a big old dinner, and I could order anything on the menu. Now, I think that was the first time I had ever been to a restaurant other than McDonald's, but that wasn’t really considered a restaurant. And my grandmother, I remember, she sat at the head of the table, and I remember I was at the other end of the table—I guess because I was the guest of honor. But I never appreciated that fact until I was older and understood the rules of guests and the rules of patriarchy and matriarchy and the head of the household. I appreciate it more even now, recalling it, because my dad was always head of the house, and he was at the head of the table. So he left his mother with respect. Always, always, my dad served himself first. He was always given the first serving; the food was placed in front of him, and then after he served, he passed it to the rest of us—peons, I guess [laughs]. You know the lesser-pecking-order people, but anyway we were the next, and then my mother was the last. I always thought, well, if you don’t prepare enough, you don’t eat [laughs]. I always thought that was the unstated reason. I don’t know, maybe it was my mother taking care of the family, and it had nothing to do with her need for hierarchy—I think maybe she wanted to make sure that we ate. But she was always the last one.

Meals, Socialization, and Respect Family meals not only enacted gender hierarchy but also were a key forum for expressing values and socializing behavior. Janice DeHerrera learned about the practice and value of meals in her family of origin. Her parents established a routine meal schedule, which they consistently

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followed and which expressed social and religious mores—for example, not cooking on Sunday to observe the Catholic day of rest. JANICE DEHERRERA ON MEALS IN HER FAMILY OF ORIGIN

I think the thing that I remember most is my mother’s cooking. Her personality was very simple, and she was spartan, and so with that came plainness with food. It was always very routine. My mother was a very good worker. She could put the meal out and clean it up in no time. It was a duty, and it was a feeding. But on my dad’s side of the family everything was centered on parties and family and who can make the best tamales. And there were competitions and rivalries between families and sisters. Who made the best tamales and who made the best eggnog and who made the best calabacitas. My mother used to make those, and anything like this homegrown. But my dad’s side of the family—the burritos, the tacos, all the ethnic foods. I kind of get this from my dad. We have to plan things. Saturday was always chicken night. In summers it was barbecue chicken. In the winters it was maybe baked or fried chicken. Sundays were always roast beef. We would go to a fine bakery and get a fancy cake or some kind of dessert—pie or something, and get that for Sunday. Monday was the one I hated the most. We would have liver or lima beans, or anything that was absolutely gross they would cook on Monday. Tuesdays, my mom did pork chops; and Wednesday was something else. Fridays were bean nights. We had pinto beans on Friday because nobody had to go to work and cause gas [laughter]. Beans and tortillas. Somewhere in there on Thursday it was lamb night or something like that, or maybe spaghetti. My parents were influenced by commercials on Sunday. Campbell Soup used to sponsor Lassie, and we always watched Lassie, so we always had Campbell’s Soup on Sunday with box pizza. In those days, my parents’ days, they didn’t want you to cook. You weren’t supposed to do any kind of work on Sundays, and you really couldn’t go out—the budget didn’t allow for it. My mother did have to cook. She’d try to make enough food at that one [main] meal so that they would have leftovers for sandwiches and stuff like that. So if she had to have box pizza, that was because there weren’t any leftovers from Sunday [lunch]. My mother wasn’t supposed to work. It was her day to rest. His day to rest and watch the game. It was important not to commit a sin.

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Religious and family values were expressed in weekly meal patterns and content and also in saying grace before meals, something many Mexicanas declared was important. Antonito was predominantly Catholic but also had a long-standing Presbyterian community.8 There were Assembly of God, Mormon, Pentecostal, and other religious groups nearby. In 2000 many people in Antonito recited the Catholic grace in English and believed that grace was an important way to bring religion into the family. MARTHA MONDRAGON ON GRACE BEFORE MEALS

Our kids know that before they come to the table, they have their hands washed. Before they sit down and eat, everyone has to be served already, and then before they eat, we all get together until we pray. No one is really to start eating until they pray. We all tend to munch every now and then, and we say, “Hold on, guys, until we pray.” Joe is very, very big on that also. We say, “Bless us, oh Lord.” Have you heard that one? “Bless us, oh Lord, and these thy gifts, which we are about to receive from Thy bounty through Christ our Lord, amen.” Yes, that’s what we say. Another thing is when we go to restaurants. In my family I remember every now and then my parents praying. But to me, and this is awful to say, it was more like an embarrassment, because my friends never used to do that, or other people would stare at us when we were doing it. We were like, “Oh, mom, why do we have to pray?” [But in] restaurants now, we make it a point that we pray before we eat. I don’t have a problem with it. To me religion nowadays is just so important, and as you grow up more and you have your own children, you see how important religion is, and you really take that with you wherever you go. TEDDY MADRID ON FAMILY MEALS, RESPECT, AND SOCIALIZATION

Meals reproduced religious values and family habits, especially the important Mexicano concept of respect.9 Teddy Madrid defined respect in Spanish: “La palabra respeto significa mucho amor y sentimiento en tu pensamiento y tus acciones. [The word “respect” means a lot of love and feeling in your thoughts and your actions].” Later in the interview, she elaborated in English: “Micah, in the book Micah, in the Old Testament, it says, ‘What does the Lord require of you? That you should love justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with your God.’ That is all that respect

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is. If you do those three things, you’re in fact fulfilling your commitment to your humanity, to your kind.” A Presbyterian, Teddy described meals as an important forum for socialization: they reinforced religious conviction, taught children respect and manners, and instituted habits of helping out and being productive. At my dad’s house, meals were just so important. We would all sit down, and we would eat together, and prayer was very important. When I came to my husband’s life, we would sit down together and eat, and prayer was not very important, until I would ask him, “Wouldn’t you like to say a word of grace?” To me, being a very deeply religious person, who believes very deeply in what God has provided for us, I believe all foods are blessed. We give a blessing over almost every food that we eat. When I was growing up meals were always—we were just talking and joking and laughing. I was the big prankster at the table until my dad got to me. We would talk about the different things. We would all be getting together, and my grandmother was having a difficult time eating the corn. So I thought, well, I’m going to imitate her and eat the corn the way she does. She would have to tear out one kernel at a time and eat it. I was small and naughty. I would eat it like she did, so naturally you don’t eat very much that way. I turned around, and all the corn—all the corn on the cob—was gone. My other sisters had eaten it all while I was doing this. I remember my dad told me, “That’s what you get—no corn left for you, young lady.” But we were talking, and we would laugh. One time I thought that there wasn’t enough going on at the table. It was at the time they were talking about UFOs. I just sat at the table and said, “I am going to make these people get up.” I pretended that I was going to go out, that I had heard something. I went out the door and looked up at the sky. I came back and said, “There is a UFO out there! Come on! Come out!” And everybody jumped up from the table and ran out. That interrupted our meal. When we came back and sat down to eat my dad just gave me a look, and he told me, “Don’t you ever do that again.” He never laid a hand on any one of us, but one look from him, and one word, “No”—that was it. That took care of it. My mother never had to punish us either because he told us, “You do anything to hurt your mother, and you will answer to me.” My mother was like two feet above the ground, always up. That’s the way we all treated her. No one ever dared to treat her otherwise. She was just great.

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Our meals were times also when my dad would give us instructions, and he would talk about all the political affairs that were going on. When we were smaller he would talk about the war [World War II] and what was going on. I remember him coming in and saying, “This was in the news today.” I can still remember Hitler’s picture. I don’t know how old I was—I must have been about six. Hitler’s picture with the Heil Hitler, and his cap on that he would wear and his mustache and it became imprinted in my mind. My dad discussed the goings-on. He was probably the only man who had a transistor radio at the house. The men in the community would come, during the war. They listened to the goings-on in the war on that radio. Then when we would have our meals, my dad would discuss things with us. We always grew up knowing all the goings-on in the world and in our country and the political things of it. My mother was just as interested, and everyone conversed— conversations about what happened at school today, what did you learn today, what do you need help in. Then we’d clear the dishes. We had a big schedule—so and so does the dishes today, you rinse, you put away, you sweep, you clean the table. Then we all had to sit down, and we didn’t have electricity when I was growing up. My mother had two big oil lamps. She had a big round table in the kitchen and enough chairs for all of us. We’d sit right there and do our homework by the light of the oil lamps. My dad, if he was there, he would help us with our math, and my mother would help us with our English and spelling. She would test us. We’d work clear into the night with our homework. We had lots of homework. Then it was the going-to-bed ritual.

Teddy linked meals to the construction of family, the learning of manners, the conduct of chores, and the value of education and respect. Another dimension of respect was to cherish food and those who gave it. Martha Mondragon said, “My parents always provided for us. But one thing they taught us was never to waste food—you eat what is on your plate. And another thing my parents used to tell us, ‘When you go somewhere, you eat what they give you whether you like it or not.’ This is no lie. I guess that’s why I grew up to like everything, just because my mom told me, ‘Don’t ever be picky; what these people are giving you may be all that they have, so you need to eat what they give to you.’” Janice DeHerrera confirmed: “I remember that we had to eat everything we served. So I learned very early to serve very small portions and then ask for seconds, or thirds, or fourths, whatever. Because if you didn’t like

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something, you were going to eat it anyway. So we learned very early that we had to eat everything.” Not wasting food was a central value in Antonito that was taught at meals and embedded in people’s need to conserve and share resources to ensure survival in the harsh climate and marginal economy (see Chap. 3). ASUNCIONITA MONDRAGON ON TEACHING SPANISH AT FAMILY MEALS

Seventy-year-old Asuncionita linked the binding tradition of family meals to the endurance of the Spanish language. She gave an example demonstrating how women, through feeding, nurtured not only family but also the Spanish language and culture. At my house before I got married, we would sit down and have breakfast—everybody together. After we got finished with breakfast everybody was about their chores so that they could bring us to school. I was raised like that—being together at the dinner table—and it had to be like that for me because that was the way I had been raised. After [my first son] Ernie was born [and] was big enough to say words, once we had breakfast we’d give him a little lesson: what’s this—azucar [sugar], sal [salt]—and we’d teach him words in Spanish. He would have a lesson every day after meals. At meals we used to visit, but once the meal was over we used to start him really learning the Spanish words. He learned. He spoke Spanish and English fluently by the time [our second child] David was born, and we did it with all the kids. The ones who didn’t pick it up the most were [the two youngest] Gloria and Martha, because we had some little neighbors and they couldn’t speak Spanish.

Conclusion The women’s stories presented a fine-grained portrait of the dense social and symbolic content of meals among rural Mexicano families. In feeding, women expressed nurturance and emotional connection. They provided food to hungry people and linked them to the home place. At meals they created and socialized families, enacted gender roles and tensions, and communicated values. Although work schedules and television threatened the social functions of meals that were so important to family reproduction, for many Mexicanas, eating and feeding continued to be important vehicles for the reproduction of self, family, and culture.

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“It Was a Give-and-Take”

Sharing and Generosity versus Greed and Envy

Just as meals helped to construct the most basic family social unit, large feasts reinforced broad community relationships. Like many communities its size, Antonito was a complex network of interlocking relations of kinship, marriage, friendship, and enmity, often expressed through food. Sharing and generosity built relationships; stinginess, greed, and envy broke them. People expressed connection in the community through commensality, or eating together. They expressed enmity and rupture by refusing food and sometimes by bewitching it. These practices in Antonito reflected broader social exchange practices, beautifully described by Marcel Mauss in The Gift (1967). Mauss discussed the New Zealand Maori concept of the gift: “one gives away what is in reality a part of one’s nature and substance, while to receive something is to receive a part of someone’s spiritual essence” (10). In other words, one gives oneself and receives part of the other in each gift. Mauss went on to say that a gift “retains a magical and religious hold over the recipient,” which compels reciprocity (10). This continuing impulse toward reciprocity promotes harmony and ties people together.1

In Antonito gifts of food were central to the reciprocity networks and enabled women to be significant social actors. When I asked Teddy Madrid about her community in Mogote in the 1940s, she replied at once, “Oh, there was a lot of sharing.” People in Antonito placed a high value on generosity and disdained greed and envy. Sounding remarkably like Mauss, Helen Ruybal defined sharing as follows: “Accepting and giving, and accepting giving, accepting and giving a lot and also getting. It was a give-and-take.”

Cooperative Labor Exchanges An important way in which people practiced sharing in the old days was through cooperative work parties that were often accompanied by communal meals prepared by women. Carmen Lopez commented that ranching families always used to exchange labor, but the custom had disappeared. Asuncionita Mondragon also remembered cooperative labor: “Whenever my dad was branding his cows, some of the relatives and neighbors used to come and help, and when they were doing it, my dad used to go help them, my dad and my brothers. There was always that exchange—no money involved.” CORDI ORNELAS ON WORK PARTIES

Because people did not have a lot of money in the old days, work exchanges were essential. Like her brother Joe Taylor (Taylor and Taggart 2003, 83–84), Cordi Ornelas remembered cooperative kin- and neighborhood-based labor from her youth in the 1930s and 1940s when she lived across the valley in the small community of El Rito outside of San Luis. There were seven [families]. They would get together, like when they planted cauliflower we went to help them sort out the ones that had black-root. They would work in families. One day they did these people’s gardening and planting the cauliflower. Then everybody went to the next one, and then from there they went to that other one—the same with threshing. When it was time to thresh the wheat and the barley, they would help each other out. The cooks would go, too, and they’d cook some really good dinners. Oh, they had potatoes, mashed potatoes. They had chili and mutton, and the meat was so soft because they would let it boil—they would slaughter a sheep, and they’d boil a sheep. The cooks were the ladies from the

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house and the neighbors. This one had been over there, and then that one came over here, and the one from here was going to be next, so the neighbors just gathered together and just had a good time, and that made work seem easier, too.

YOLANDA SALAZAR ON MAKING AND SELLING TAMALES

While Cordi Ornelas’s memories harked back to pre–World War II in a tiny agricultural hamlet across the valley, thirty-four-year-old Yolanda Salazar described a form of family-based cooperative kitchen labor that took place in Antonito in 2003 to raise money for a friend in need. She had moved to Antonito from Farmington, New Mexico, when she was sixteen and her mother married a man from town. She met and married Anthony, became part of his large extended family, and grew to love Antonito. She worked at various jobs: house cleaner, school bus driver, home day care provider, and Wal-Mart clerk. Her story below reveals her high spirits and warm heart. At Christmas we always do tamales, and we’ve gotten to the point that people like our tamales. So last year we made almost seventy dozen, and we sold probably all of them except for maybe five dozen. That was when Kathy was having problems with her baby, so all the money we made, we gave it to Kathy. Now people are bugging me already, “When are you making tamales again?” God, I don’t think I can handle that. Me and Frances did it, and my other sister-in-law helped a little bit, but it was mostly me and Frances. We had the kids helping, doing little things here and there. We had my husband, Anthony, helping. But I had to tie every single one because the others didn’t know how to tie them. We use chile molido, we use chile caribe, and if we want it hotter we use chile pequin. We make just like a thick chili, we add our meat in there, cook it, and then we use masa harina to make our dough, put it in corn husks, roll them, boil them, cook them. We sold them last year for $10 a dozen, and people were pretty satisfied with what they got. We did them for a whole entire weekend—Friday, Saturday, Sunday, we did tamales. After that you don’t want to see tamales for a long time.

It was exhausting making seventy dozen tamales, but it enabled Yolanda and her sister-in-law to donate a good sum of money to a friend and perpetuated the ethic of reciprocity.

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Sharing and Generosity People not only exchanged labor but also food itself with neighbors and friends. Moreover, hospitality rules required that people offer visitors food and drink as soon as they arrived at the door. Offering something was a way to bridge social separation and emphasize equality. Many women mentioned specific examples of sharing food to establish positive and egalitarian relationships. At her job at the elementary school, Janice DeHerrera observed that the children demanded equal servings of food: “At the school, passing out cookies, everybody sees that everybody else gets the same amount. If a kid says, ‘I didn’t get any of that,’ we say, ‘Well, go back in line and get some.’ Then they come back and eat it, and they feel all good because they got the same as everybody else. Or maybe they don’t even eat it. But they have to feel like they’re the same, yes, I see that, in everything.” There was a clear link between sharing and equality, and Antonito Mexicanas practiced sharing with friends and neighbors to forge community well-being and harmony. ASUNCIONITA MONDRAGON ON SHARING FOOD WITH NEIGHBORS

In the 1940s and 1950s, Asuncionita Mondragon’s family shared milk and cheese (queso) with neighbors, and the neighbors shared other produce with them, but money never changed hands. Women were important actors in this gift-giving, which validated their work, redistributed resources, and fostered amity. I used to make the queso about every other day. I used to get the cream and make butter. There was quite a bit of cream, but I used to give a lot of it away. I never sold queso or anything. Anybody who felt they wanted a queso I used to give them one. Anybody who was in desire of a cheese, I’d make them a cheese and take it to them, or cream. My mother never sold. She used to have a milk cow, and she always sent a gallon of milk to our next-door neighbors. They were compadres, and we used to take them a gallon of milk every day. Sometimes we’d send them a cheese or something like that. In the summer months, they used to go to Rocky Ford and bring a truckload of melons, watermelon, and corn, and they always sent us a bushel of cantaloupe and watermelon and the stuff that they would bring from over here. We never sold anything to any of our neighbors.

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HELEN RUYBAL ON SHARING HONEY AND MEAT

Helen Ruybal, a generation older than Asuncionita Mondragon, also emphasized the role of nonmonetary sharing in building social relations. Helen and Carlos Ruybal raised cattle and always had meat in the freezer to give away. People valued the excellent quality of their range-fed cattle. They also kept beehives on their land in Mogote and Lobatos, enough to produce “loads” of honey, which they gave away to friends and relatives to strengthen relationships and spread their largesse in a way that cost them little but benefited others. Oh, I’d give honey to all the people in Alamosa, and from here too. Carlos would supervise, when it was ready to scoop it out. The one that was ready, you could see it draining. Carlos would put it in a big pan. Then at home he would put it in bottles, with a purpose—to give away. Like a quart, like a pint, and some of them would get more, and, boy, it was always welcome. Everybody liked honey. They didn’t ask; we’d just tell them, “We have some honey.” They’d say, “Sure, we do like honey.” It was close people, close friends. It was just like a greeting. Like I’d say, “Carole, Carole is good to me, she gives me that,” and then I have lots of honey, and I get a big bottle and tell her to come and pick it up. Or maybe Carlos would go take it. A big bottle. Oh, they liked it. You did it if you felt like it, or especially when you had it, like we had meat and milk and honey. We were always giving it away, but we couldn’t use it—well, we could use honey, I guess, but the meat, they grabbed it. Lola, she is a widow now. Her husband, Tony, died up near Albuquerque. They used to come to town and stop at my house on the way back and take meat. They didn’t take honey; they took meat. All we wanted to give, we’d give them. Because we packed it in generous packs, not little bits. Like always for three or four people, or a lot more for a second helping. Tony would stop, and they exchanged stories, because his father used to work by Carlos—in the same ranches. He says, “Well, Carlos sent us, Mrs. Ruybal. You know what we came here for, besides visiting?” I say, “I don’t know, but I’m going to get you some meat.” They say, “Fine, fine.” Now he died. But she is still alive. And she remembered all that at the funeral, after dinner, when talking there. “Every time,” she says, “I have good meat, I remember when you used

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Beehives and the Mogote Peaks.

to give Tony so many packages.” I felt like I was giving something good and that they are good friends or even new friends who come and talk about it, and we’d give them meat or a jar of honey. They don’t expect it, or maybe they did in their mind. That meant that I was giving something. It didn’t cost me a penny, and it saved a lot of pennies for the one who got it. I just figured now they don’t have to buy it, just eat it up. We felt good that they appreciated that and came back for more, hinted, you know [laughs]. Like this Tony, he was a teacher and then he lost one leg, so he had to retire. He and I used to teach together in Mogote. He knew that he was expected to come and pick up a bite of meat of the cattle ranch. He said, “I eat a lot of meat, but it’s from the store, and I know that it doesn’t taste as good as yours.” I think, when I stop to think, it was an interesting story, and it’s interesting how we lived. We didn’t appreciate it as much as we do now, thinking about it. Then we didn’t feel like we had plenty, and we didn’t feel like we were using any of our income when we told them, “Would you like fresh meat from the ranches?” And they say, “Oh, that’s the only one that tastes real good. The ones in the store have some kind of an odd taste compared to yours.” But we gave pure—pure meat, pure honey. That’s the thing we used to give away.

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[In return] maybe we’d get invited to a small dinner but not a big get-paid-back. Some of them would bring me some quelites, some spinach, from the ranch, from the willows there, oh, and we loved it. The one we could get from Senior Citizens tastes to me like a little bunch of hay [laughs]. They gave the quelites as we were coming to our place, so they thought they had something to give me. They gave big bags, full, already clean. Some of them would bring it with roots and all, and I had to clean it myself. I didn’t mind it because I never had to go hunting for quelites, and I loved them.

Helen Ruybal’s story encapsulated how a land-based economy facilitated gift-giving: people were able to produce more than they needed and thus had a surplus to give away. To be sure, the Ruybals had more than many, but gift-giving occurred among people at all economic levels; there was always something free for the taking, such as the quelites that Helen loved, as well as blackberries, chokecherries, rose hips, fish, or game. Acts of generosity became part of local lore and promoted the value of sharing and the status of generous people, thereby building long-term relationships and community values.

Greed and Envy As much as people valued sharing and generosity, they were threatened by envidia—envy, stinginess, and greed.2 At an interview one afternoon at Helen Ruybal’s house, she and Carmen Lopez became extremely animated when the conversation turned to sharing, which they praised, and envy, which they excoriated. They raised a key term that revealed community values: cuzco (or cusco). In his dictionary of San Luis Valley Spanish, Trujillo (1983) defined cusco as “greedy,” “stingy,” or “gluttonous,” aptly showing a link between this negative appellation and the hoarding of food. Similarly, Cobos (1983, 41) defined cuzco as “greedy, hoggish; selfish, stingy.”3 Antonito resident Joe Taylor contrasted the cuzco with the granjeador, or magnanimous person, by referring to his father, an excellent fisherman who gave away fish throughout the community: “He’d send us over there to take fish to the sisters, take fish to the priest, take fish to the doctor. He was a granjeador, granjeaba. He wasn’t what you call a cuzco. A cuzco is a guy that hoards everything. He won’t give anybody anything. He won’t share. But my dad no. If you came to his house, you ate, and if he had something, he’d give it to you” (Taylor and Taggart 2003, 123).

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Cuzco is related to the negative concept of the lambe, the Mexicano who adhered too closely to the dominant Anglo culture—what Bernadette Vigil called “a lick-ass.” Taylor and Taggart (2004, 114) defined lambe as a “brownnose[,] . . . a Mexicano who seemed to curry favor with those in positions of wealth and power or who aspired to obtain such a position.” This epithet reinforced community egalitarianism, which had both positive and negative aspects. Bernadette pointed out one negative aspect: Mexicanos did not always support the advancement of other Mexicanos but rather had the attitude, “We’re all going to scrape the bottom of the barrel together” (see Chap. 2). Joe Taylor described this same tendency among Antonito Mexicanos to pull each other down as acting like “crabs in a bucket,” and he defined it as a result of class and racial-ethnic oppression (Taylor and Taggart 2003). Envy and pulling others down was the negative side of egalitarianism; sharing was the positive side. Carmen Lopez and Helen Ruybal talked about the conflict between these positive and negative forces and the way in which the latter seemed to be gaining strength in recent times. Carmen was born and raised in Ortiz in the 1940s and moved away from Antonito after high school to work as a dishwasher, cook, social services worker, and heavy equipment operator before retiring and building a home in Antonito. She became involved in many local causes and served a term as mayor, a difficult job in a town where politics were often acrimonious. She spent a lot of time visiting with Helen. CARMEN LOPEZ AND HELEN RUYBAL ON SHARING, CUZCO, AND ENVIDIA

Carmen: If my friends didn’t have what I had, they would have it because I would give it to them. I think we didn’t want [people] to feel alone. So we used to bring them in and share. We used to share everything. Like if I had a shoe that didn’t fit me, I would give it to the kid who could wear it. If the mother was making empanaditas, and I walked in, they would give me empanaditas. So it was [with] clothes, food, support—everything was there in those good times. Life has changed now. I think we are more greedy now that we are old than when we were young. Why? Don’t ask me, because I don’t know. I’ve been trying to figure this one out; I can’t. I remember this word cuzco. The best way that our parents could punish us would be to call us and tell us, “You’re a bunch of cuzcos,” and that was a sound of meanness and we didn’t want that. We didn’t want to be cuzcos. No way.

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Helen: Cuzco was not a good comment, a good trait. No, if you’re cuzco, that’s what they called you cuzco. What is it in English? Carole: Stingy? Helen: Stingy. She’s not stingy; she gives a handful of candy to the kids when they go trick-or-treating. In a cuzco way would be, “We have twenty more coming, so I better give only two pieces of candy,” and tries to get ready for the group in the future. Carole: When people came to visit at your house did you show your generosity in specific ways? Carmen: Oh, yes. We used to welcome people whether we knew them or not, we used to welcome them, and we used to offer them coffee, biscochitos—whatever we had. Then we used to sit down and talk. We still do this. Look at yourself, now I want you to really listen to this, real good. How long have you known Helen? Carole: Six years. Carmen: Six years. In six years you have become so good friends to her that you’re sharing with her. You take her home, you share that bread, that whatever. I saw you walking [to her house] with this ollita [little pot] of beef stew. You see, we have so much in common. I don’t care how it’s said, but it’s all the same. We love people because we love ourselves. Not all the people were poor, but for the poor people it was hard, very hard. But we always used to help out, always. They earned less, and so they learned to live with less. They used to share the work. If the neighbor needed to have something done, these neighbors would get together and go help. I don’t see that happening anymore. It’s over; it’s a new thing coming in. It’s that hatred, that envidia: why should you have it, when I already have it? It’s changing. Helen: It’s jealousy. That’s bad, jealousy, it never worked good, never. Carmen: For me, a person who’s like that, he’s a miserable person, very miserable, but we have them. Why we changed, the way we all did, I don’t know. I don’t know if it’s the time. I think they got greedy. Why? I don’t know. Helen: That’s envy. They weren’t satisfied with being the lower producer. Sharing is a very good thing. But envy is bad, bad, even today and always has been. You lose good opportunities just because they’re jealous of you. I don’t know if it would be an example, but all the people envy Carmen because she got this [sidewalk] project done, and they don’t give her credit.4 In fact, they might kick her down. People don’t understand that it’s a good thing to have a person like

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Carmen: Helen: Carmen: Helen: Carmen:

Helen: Carmen:

that who has talent and the courage to go on. So that’s envy. Oh, I don’t like envy. It never has worked among people. It destroys. It destroys friendship and all that. I don’t know if being in 2001 is better than being in 1934, I don’t know. I still say 1934 was better. People were more understanding. Yes. And they were willing to help, they wanted you to have, [and] they didn’t destroy people. Matter of fact, our parents, if a neighbor would come in and we didn’t talk to that neighbor or that neighbor asked us for a glass of water and we just threw it like this, oh, boy. They would whip us. It was a respect. I think life has changed, and I think this world is facing big problems and we don’t know how to address them, so we find ourselves getting depressed. It causes— —sadness, regretfulness. Yes, like being greedy and not wanting to understand, it’s like an illness, like they enjoy looking at people feeling this way, instead of seeing them feel happy and enjoying it. Why is it happening? Maybe it’s the time, I don’t know. But I sure don’t want to do that. No. Work against what the parents taught us? I don’t think so. I don’t know if it’s the end of time, but life is changing to the worst, it looks like. Everybody fighting, envy, badmouthing, killing.

HELEN RUYBAL ON ENVY

Carmen Lopez and Helen Ruybal linked the bad trends of their time to the increase in greed and the decline in generosity. Interestingly, in her trick-or-treat example, Helen defined saving for the future—the very heart of capitalism—negatively and showed the conflict between the values of traditional land-based cultures of sharing and community survival and those of capitalism based on hoarding and individual betterment.5 Helen was able to function in both those worlds, running a successful ranching business with Carlos while also contributing generously to reciprocity networks. In another interview, Helen explained how envy manifested itself. Envy, supposing that they think that I’m lucky, that the Taggarts invite me for dinner—some are just going to make me be sick so I wouldn’t feel like going. That’s envy. Or if you’re a good cook, and I go around saying, “She’s not good,” just kind of running you down. That’s having

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envy against each other. Or if you’re lucky about anything, and I have it against you somehow. I don’t want to be the worst; I want to be better. I find a way to ruin your career, whatever it is. Oh, this envy is bad. It’s between me and all these people, even young people. They dislike you for just anything. Or behind your back they talk and make other people believe you’re that way. Or if you’re buying something, if you’re buying a new car, and a lot of people will say, “How in the world did they get that car? They don’t even have money.” And they start [making up] stories. That’s envy. Or if you’re a good cook and I admire you and I just wish I could be like that. You can wish for something in the right way, and you can wish things for hurting other people. Even talking, you can talk about some people and hurt them. That’s envy. It usually starts from envy, because you don’t want anybody to be better than you, especially your friends.

Envy and Witchcraft When sharing failed and relationships broke down, envy sometimes led to witchcraft. Although it was impossible to know how many people practiced or believed in witchcraft in Antonito, it definitely existed. Taylor and Taggart (2003, 149–161) defined witchcraft as “a system of belief with long antecedents in the Southwest that explains misfortune” and linked it to the class system that burgeoned with Anglo immigration to the area in the late nineteenth century. They suggested that the Antonito form of witchcraft was “probably an amalgam of Native American and Spanish culture.”6 Most of the women I interviewed held ambivalent views about witchcraft, implying that they had heard about witches and didn’t really believe in them but took precautions to protect against them, just in case. Many of the women felt that if you didn’t believe in witches, they could not hurt you but also said that they had heard of witches both causing harm and effecting cures. Interestingly, witches (brujas) were often said to be old, ugly, single women, as witches have so often been depicted across time and place (Thurston 2007). Ninety-three-year-old Naomi Mestas said, “My grandma used to say that when people got old that they always used to say that they were witches. She said, ‘You get old and you’re a witch.’ So, I guess I’m a witch now!” Not only were old women often named as witches, but so were tough, hard-nosed ones; one evening some Antonito friends joked about the “bitch as witch” theory. Other people named some women who were moneylenders as witches, perhaps an association fostered by

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the lenders whose repayment rate would surely benefit from a reputation for witchcraft.7 Although most witches described to me were women, Helen mentioned one witch who passed along her power to both male and female descendants. One woman I spoke with, Amalia (a pseudonym), was convinced that witches existed and described one who had bewitched her husband into having a long-term sexual relationship with her. The witch came into Amalia’s house and took her jewelry, blouses, and cosmetics. Amalia’s husband, John (a pseudonym), often went up to the mountains to consort with this witch. On one occasion Amalia and John went to their mountain cabin, and as soon as they arrived he ran to the outhouse. He stayed there a long time. Amalia called him and called him, but he did not return. She finally went to the outhouse; when she opened the door John came out with his pants around his ankles, and a big furry black animal came running out. It was like a porcupine, only bigger and rounder and all black. Amalia chased the animal and threw a rock at her, but she ran down into a ditch and got away. That, Amalia said, was the witch. Amalia said that for years John would go away for business and meet this witch, and it caused her a lot of pain. When he died, she didn’t care at all, because she was so worn down from his years of philandering. Many others also attributed their misfortune to witches, but some people agreed with Ramona Valdez: “All I know is, they say if you don’t believe in witches, they can’t get to you.” Unlike Amalia, who was a firm believer, most of the women I interviewed had a wary skepticism of witchcraft. Cordi Ornelas, for example, said, “I believe there could be witches.”8 Many people protected themselves from witches with protective measures such as making a cross over the door with two needles, wearing clothes inside out, carrying garlic or oshá (lovage), or refusing food or drink offered by a known witch. Helen clearly defined the role of contagion in food’s ability to work evil: “How do the brujas give a disease? Well, in food, in touching you. They can give you a present of potatoes, apples, or big peaches, or anything, and they could be infected.”9 Because often people did not know who was a witch, they were wary of accepting food that had passed through several hands, believing that any of those hands could contaminate it. Ramona Valdez believed that making a cross over bewitched food would purify it, but she said, “Why would I want to eat food if I thought it was from a witch?” She went on to answer her own question: “I guess people were more hungry in the old days.”

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HELEN RUYBAL ON WITCHCRAFT, CURANDERAS, AND ENVY

In one of our seventeen interviews, Helen described witchcraft in detail, touching on several important points: contagion through ingestion, measures of prevention, dangers from third-party food transmission, envy as cause, and skepticism. Although Helen said witches happened long ago, she described a case from the late 1990s in which fear of witchcraft from third parties caused a man to spurn food offerings after his wife’s death. In her narrative she demonstrated extreme ambivalence, in one breath saying she did not believe in witches and in the next breath indicating that she did. Such ambivalence was typical of attitudes toward witchcraft in Antonito. They saw an old lady, and they thought she was a witch. I don’t believe it, but there used to be one lady who had the name of being a witch. They were afraid the witches had bewitched the food. Oh, that’s long ago, but I was already on the globe when this was going on. They call them brujas in Spanish. They say, but I don’t know, that they could get people sick, their enemies. They could get even. I heard the story of two ladies who were good friends, and then they had a misunderstanding, so one of them brought [the other] food one day, and she wouldn’t eat it because she was afraid. She put it away for dinner or for another time, and then she threw it away. One time we had two professional witches, like doctors. They could tell who was bewitched or who was sick of something else. They were smart. If some were going crazy or going down because they were sick, they’d go to them and get them well, not all of them but a lot of them. They were two or three [witches] in one family, a sister and a son and another sister. They said that when one died, she turned her power over to her son. I don’t know that, but I just heard it from other people. She’d take care of anybody who came to her house, but she wouldn’t go uptown to another house because she said that the other witches would be against her. They had to be equal, aligned together, faithful to each other, but at home she treated a lot of patients who got well, patients who didn’t know what was wrong with them, and they didn’t have pains. I don’t know how to put it, but they had sickness they didn’t know what it was, or maybe the doctors couldn’t find anything wrong. They would come over here to her house, and a lot of them got well. She had different measures, different routines for how to take care of them.

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Some of them say that she spent a little time, others a week. But that lady never went anywhere, and she made money. I was just telling you that they used to warn us people. I lived at that time, but I don’t know whether I was kind of timid or didn’t believe, but I still avoided. People said if witches give you something [to eat], they put something in it, you don’t know the difference. They know how to make poison, and they put it in your glass and you don’t see it. That worked and made people sick, or very sick some of them; some of them went crazy and all that. So they used to warn us to be careful when we had drinks, even at the parties or dances, not to drink cokes there in the open but only by the cans.10 So that was one belief. Another one was that if you wore something the wrong side out, like any garment on your body, the witches would not get near you and could not do anything to you. I don’t believe that. The girl who takes care of me, who dresses me, says, “Oh, that’s on the wrong side.” “Oh,” I say, “Let it go. Then the witches will not get me, bite me.” I just tell her, and she says, “Oh,” and she doesn’t turn it right side up. So those are two beliefs that still are. This man Arturo11 lost his wife the other day. This woman Caterina who sells cheese, homemade white cheese called queso, used to sell Arturo and his wife cheese all the time. When the wife died, Caterina brought a big cheese for Arturo. But he wasn’t home; he was at the funeral parlor visiting his wife who was in the chapel already dead. So Caterina gave the big platter of cheese to Paula, their neighbor, saying, “When he comes, tell him I brought this for them.” So when Arturo returned, Paula brought the queso to him, just next door, and he says, “Who sent this?” She says, “Caterina brought it, the one whom you buy from all the time.” Arturo looked at it and put it there. Oh, and a good day after, Paula said, “How do you like that cheese?” He says, “I don’t know. I haven’t touched it.” “Well, why aren’t you eating it? It’s good and expensive.” He said, “Well, you must never take a plate or a dish given by somebody else.” I knew that before, but he knew this girl Caterina real well, and I don’t think she’s a witch, the one who makes cheese. But he said, “No, I don’t take food that comes to me from somebody else. If she had brought it to me,” he said, “it would be all right, but she sent it to you.” So Paula told him the story, but then he didn’t eat the cheese. And they loved cheese, they used to buy it every week, when Caterina came to sell.

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In the past they had heard that somebody got sick because somebody brought some food, and they didn’t know if it was poisonous or poisoned. It’s superstition, but people who don’t believe, they just don’t follow it. But I know some people still reject taking people’s gifts—they bring a nice cake or a nice pudding or something, and they don’t eat it because they say, “I think she’s a witch, I think her grandma is a witch.” But if you have confidence in the one who makes it and brings it to you, it’s all right. I don’t practice it, but I believe that if you get suspicious about some food coming in from nowhere or something like that, I think it could be poison. If you’re jealous, if you envy somebody for something, and they’re trying to make you get down, turned to the worst, or get you sick. I do believe that. I know we used to believe, or the old people did, and some still do, kind of young people. I know things that have happened, like when I was real young, a lady, two ladies were neighbors, good neighbors, in Punche Valley, and finally they ran into trouble, fighting over something. They became enemies. They really were hurting each other with stealing things—they couldn’t hang clothing out because it would get lost—and they were blaming each other for everything. They really did get along awfully bad, but when one died, oh, the other said that she was a witch. But this other lady didn’t know how she could have hurt her; it was through other people. They could have given other people some food to bring to her, and she ate it, she blamed it. That’s the way it had happened because they couldn’t stand the sight of each other. Then that lady died, the one who was the bewitcher, died, was dying, really dying, and this other one was alone at the Punche Valley; she lived there. In the middle of the night she heard this window coming up and closing without seeing anybody. So she thought that lady was doing it, because she was sick. Then she talked to her and said, “If I ever did hurt you in any way, I want you to forgive me. And if you hurt me, you’re forgiven. If you’re going to die, die in peace, but we want to be forgiving each other.” The window stopped, and the next morning the lady was dead.

In Helen Ruybal’s narrative, envy led to witchcraft and to a failure of the valued reciprocity that was essential to survival and friendship. But her story ended on the hopeful note of forgiveness, an apt antidote to envy and witchcraft.

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Conclusion Poverty in Antonito was widespread, and resources were limited. In the past, an ethos of sharing—especially of food—helped to neutralize differences of wealth and counteract envy, but sometimes it overwhelmed social controls and jealous people turned to witchcraft. In recent times some spoke of an increase in individualism, but people still shared in times of crisis, for example, at a death or in cases of extreme poverty. These two cases are the topics of the next two chapters.

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9

“Come Out of Your Grief”

Death and Commensality

In the small town of Antonito, death tore apart the community, and people reknitted it with collective mourning, prayer, and commensality. As in many communities the world over, food played a significant role in rituals of death (Thursby 2006, 79). The preparation and consumption of customary foods reestablished a sense of normality, brought community members together, and gave them something to do (9). Death brought sadness, which food helped to alleviate, for, as Bakhtin has said, “sadness and food are incompatible.”1 Furthermore, food was a key part of many rituals. Those surrounding death were examples of what Van Gennep (1960) has called “rites of passage,” which are characterized by three phases: separation, transition, and incorporation.2 In Antonito people described three forms of commensality that were part of death rituals: the red chili dinner served at the wake (velorio) in the old days mediated the “separation” phase; the giving and eating of food at the home of the deceased’s family during the prefuneral mourning period represented “transition”; and the communal farewell dinner after the funeral involved “incorporation.”

The Wake According to Celina Romero, the meal centered on red chili “was a tradition.” Helen Ruybal and Cordi Ornelas spoke in some detail about the traditional velorio, which took place at the home of the deceased probably through the 1960s.3 When the wake no longer took place at home, the midnight meal for the assembled mourners faded away, but the family still had to feed many visiting friends and relatives. CORDI ORNELAS ON FOODS AT THE WAKE

Born in 1925, Cordi Ornelas remembered the events surrounding death in the 1930s and 1940s when she was growing up in El Rito. For funerals and weddings there was always red chili there. And the meat would boil until it was real soft. They had a dinner, and they fed everybody who came. That was interesting to me because when I was a little girl and a relative would die, then we would have the wakes. People would come, whether they were related or not, and then around midnight they would feed the people. They had mashed potatoes, and green chili, and red chili, and some kind of vegetable. Why red chili? Because it’s good, for one thing! It was very good. If you want to try it sometime, just boil a steak, or a round steak perhaps, until it’s good and tender, and then you cut it up into small portions if you want to lick your fingers. Make chili like that, and it is very good. It was an old custom that had been around long before I came. I think tortillas would have been too much trouble to make. They had bread, and I have seen for one of the wakes when an aunt of my dad died, they had an horno, and they were cooking bread in that. We had the Penitentes, have you heard about Penitentes? They would come and sing there. My dad was a carpenter of sorts, so he would make the coffin. Then the women would line it, usually with gray flannel, and then they would line the basket inside. The Penitentes would sing, and then they had a crying spell, and then they would sing some more. There was the hammering of the coffin, and the cooks were cooking in the kitchen.

Singing, praying, wailing over the dead, and eating red chili were all part of the mourning rituals. Key players were the Penitentes.4 Each

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group of Penitentes had a morada where they practiced prayer and religious rituals. They identified with the suffering of Christ and were said to practice self-flagellation. They were key mourners at the Holy Week rituals and at funerals.5 HELEN RUYBAL ON DEATH, VELORIOS, AND FUNERALS

Helen Ruybal also mentioned that the Penitentes attended the wake at the home of the deceased. Helen’s recollections of death and its rituals spanned most of the twentieth century, starting from her girlhood in the 1920s. She remembered the chili dinner at the velorio and the practice of bringing food to the family of the deceased and later the inauguration of the big postfuneral dinners. She and others remarked about the similarity between the meals served at weddings and at funerals—especially red chili. Perhaps this made a symbolic linking of marriage, where the reproductive cycle began, and death, where it ended. Red chili was one of the most common and beloved dishes in Antonito, something that symbolized the community. Helen described the funeral food traditions. When I was younger, and a person died, they put him in a cold place. They didn’t have a mortuary, and so they put him in a cold room with the windows open, and they hurried to bury him in two days, because [the body] spoiled. You could smell it. If they had a man over two days, they put him with half of his body outside of the window and the other half in the coffin. They were always in a rush. They didn’t want to bury him quick, and yet they had to. That was awful. They used to fumigate the house—some people burned sugar on the stove, like when you go to cook and it burns on you. It would smell perfume-like, and it got all over the house, good and sugary, and if I remember right they did it to kill the smell; it wouldn’t do anything to the body. Then they would take them to the cemetery, and I remember when they used to take them in a wagon. If somebody died here in this house, they had the meeting of praying and singing, just like they do at Romero’s [Funeral Home] now. They stayed up until late, twelve, I guess, and then the next day they had the funeral. They just sang hymns, the Penitentes. They used to be the main characters there, but all the people would join in saying the rosary—we say one Our Father and nine Hail Marys five times around the rosary. We would say that, all the people. The Penitentes sang their hymns. They would tell us when they wanted us to sing. There was no entertainment,

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no visiting. It wasn’t a place to have a good time, or hear or talk, just singing and praying. But that was the main thing, a rosary. Everybody knew the answers, the prayers. Oh, and they had a supper, a big supper, just the owners of the body—red chili with meat and beans and baked potatoes. Panocha [sprouted wheat pudding], they had big bowls ready to serve, and corn on the cob, and they used to make tamales, and some other things. It was a Mexican meal mostly. The owners were responsible for all that. Red chili was just a delicacy, the main thing. The men or young men who were out talking said, “We have to go to the chili dinner”—to the velorio. “Boy, we’ll have good chili.” They used to be good, good cooks. They’d have other things, too, but chili was the main thing. You could use it with your mashed potatoes, or you could have your bowl of chili on the side and put potatoes over here, or beans. It used to be beans very much, and mashed potatoes. It was a jolly time for the loafers. The owners of the dead person were grieving. They used to cry a lot, loud. But not anymore. They don’t even cry quietly. Maybe you’ll see tears roll off of the real main—like daughters or fathers or mothers. But back then the whole family used to cry. It was expected. We weren’t surprised to hear that. [After the funeral] we didn’t go to eat like now. They didn’t prepare big dinners, but just for the family. The oldest girls and ladies would prepare a dinner, just a small dinner. They didn’t invite everybody to come. We didn’t expect to go and eat there. Never, not unless you were invited personally. Then at the end of five days, they’d give another Mass in the honor of the body. They called it hondra. Hondra means “honorary.” And then no dinner or nothing. We just went to the church if we wanted to. Then that was the end. If you knew these people, like if you knew me, you would go and see how I was getting along after two weeks, or one week, or a few days. But at the house, there was nothing but a dinner for the immediate family that came to the funeral from far off. Sometimes [people bring food to the home of the deceased], but very seldom. Like if I died, you’d probably make a nice dish of salad, and you’d come and give your condolences, and give it. They don’t even say anything; they just give it and put it over there. That’s what I’ve seen them do with salads. I haven’t seen them bring anything else. Some of them buy a cake and bring it. But that’s very optional. They don’t expect it. But especially if you come to the house before the funeral, just to show that there is concern, that you feel sorry. I’d take real nice pudding, salads with a lot of green ingredients. What I take is a can of coffee, or

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a can of fruit, big ones. But I don’t cook anything. But you know they appreciate coffee. Somebody from the house dies, and people start coming in, and by the time ten people come, one coffee pot’s gone. I’ve had remarks from somebody, thanking me for the coffee I took, saying, “That really served the purpose, we didn’t have to worry about running out.” They’re coming at night for this rosary. Everyone who dies has a rosary, at night, with a lot of people, in the funeral home. The priest doesn’t say the rosary; the devout ladies do. The priests used to, years ago. When Carlos died the priests used to do it. But now they have a girl do it. After that—they keep them there, at the funeral home. On the Mass day, they take the bodies there, but they don’t open the coffin. They were closed for the services, and then they’d put the body over here by the door, and they’d open the coffin. Then you could just good-bye greet. So in a big funeral, there was a big wait. Then they’d cover him up and put him in a hearse and they’d go and you’d follow. They spread all over around, at the cemetery. On the ground you see the grave, and all the pallbearers and close relatives have flowers, and each one puts one in the coffin when it’s ready to go down, and the priest says some prayers.

Food Gifts for the Bereaved Helen Ruybal spoke about funeral mores changing over the course of her ninety-plus years. She remembered the velorios and their chili dinners, the Penitentes praying, and the giving of food gifts to the bereaved family. These fostered the second kind of commensality surrounding death—the informal eating together that took place at the deceased person’s home during the trying days between the death and the burial. Many women, like Helen, mentioned taking food to the mourning family to help feed locals and out-of-town relatives. This habit is still common today. JANICE DEHERRERA ON FOOD AND DEATH

During a group interview with Janice DeHerrera, Anna Garcia, and Celina Romero and her daughters, Norma and Claudine, Janice elaborated on the way in which people in Antonito deal with death. It is popular to go, if somebody is close to you, to take them food— because you get a lot of visitors in your house, and you have to be a good host and provide food for the people. Then you have to have a big

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dinner after the funeral. That’s when people give money. Nowadays. During the old days they used to help make [the food]. If you’re close you should give money, so when they have to make their after-funeral dinner that takes the burden off.

MARTHA MONDRAGON ON DEATH AND FOOD SHARING

Martha Mondragon, the youngest participant in my study, emphasized the continuing importance of bringing food to the family of the deceased and contrasted this Hispanic practice with its absence in the Mormon community. It’s something that I always remember from when I was small that my parents always did. I know that to be very common in the Hispanic tradition. Joe and I were talking about this the other evening. We went to a friend’s house. [His] brother had passed away in a car accident, and the mother was Mormon, and we mentioned taking food to their home, and our friend didn’t know what we were talking about. We explained to him it was just something when someone passed away to help the families out because they got company and everything—to take food to the home. They were very thankful because they never knew of that. The Mormon women got together, and they were going to have a little something [after the funeral]. Joe and I were like, “Oh, my gosh, are these people going to have enough food for all these people who are going to come?” Well, anyway, luckily, we decided to make a big meal for them. We made them a big turkey, and chili and beans, and I think there was one more thing, too, and we made big portions. When we got there to the church the people were so thankful, because they were told to only prepare for like twenty people, mind you. I don’t know where they got the number. But, anyways, one of the gals went to the burial site, and she saw all these people there. The Mormon women, they had nice dishes, they had wonderful dishes, but it wasn’t enough for everybody, so then when we took our food, they were so thankful. They said, “We never expected it.” That’s just something real common that we do in the Hispanic tradition when someone passes on. Usually they’ll have a dinner after the burial, and they’ll either have it at a home or usually at a dinner hall place, or a church setting, a parish hall. We tend to take food first to the home, just because people have relatives coming in, they have family, they have friends coming to visit. That’s just something we’ve always

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done. We’ll usually do that the day after we find out that the individual has died, just to help these people out with food. There’s been times, for instance, when [one friend’s] niece passed away. Financially they weren’t doing very well. Joe says, “You know, we should take them some food.” I’m glad we did, because when we took them the food, Joe said, “They had a houseful of people, and there was no food there, no food whatsoever.” He bought about $50 worth of lunch meats and juice and cookies and donuts and bread and stuff, just to make sandwiches, and chips and dip, and took it to them. A lot of people are very appreciative. This other family that we just recently took to, the daughter was twenty-six years old when she passed away, and then everybody gathered at her parents’ house. I was very surprised because when we took the food in, there was [nothing]— unless they had it all put away already, but usually if you go into the homes of someone who has passed on, you find food all over, because that’s a tradition that we’re used to doing, in the Hispanic community, people automatically will take food. My mom’s favorite that she used to make for families was cakes. She used to automatically bake a cake, and she would take it. [At the dinner after the funeral] what they usually tend to have are turkeys, mashed potatoes and gravy, green salad, and corn. You find that a lot, and then they’ll have punch. I think that the meal is basically for people who attend the service to be able to get together afterward to socialize. Before the burial and everything and still after, it’s a grieving process. There’s the rosary, and there’s the funeral, and people are coming and going and trying to prepare. They do shopping before, and they do this and that, and they miss out on a lot of people. They [have the funeral dinner] just for the socialization part, and then for people who are heading back to wherever they came from. And as an appreciation, too.

Farewell Dinners The third type of commensality associated with death, the farewell dinner, was a public meal held immediately after the funeral for all the mourners. It was a large community gathering and appeared to have started after the velorio meal was no longer practiced. It was a redistributive feast: the grieving family gave back to friends and neighbors the foods and money that they had received in the days before the funeral. It served to provide sustenance—both physical and emotional—for the family and

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friends of the deceased, some of whom helped to prepare and serve the farewell dinner. This tradition expanded networks of help and caring and reintegrated the community, as Yolanda Salazar’s story revealed. YOLANDA SALAZAR ON DEATH, COMMUNITY, AND COMMENSALITY

I remember my stepdad’s death. People would bring pots of beans and pots of chili and hams and turkeys and lunch meats and bread and anything you could think of. People were bringing it to the house, including money. I remember [someone saying], “Here, let me give you $20. That has to help you somewhere.” People are really, really good about bringing anything that you could possibly want. With a lot stuff, we saved it for the dinner we had after the funeral. We had about twenty loaves of bread. What are you going do with twenty loaves of bread? I think that people do it because they know you’re going to have a lot of company, [and] this way you have things to feed them. We had a lot of food, but it all went. I can remember making a turkey that night, a turkey, and I’m going to say ham, mashed potatoes, green chili, red chili, salad—I think we had green salad. A few people were doing it. My stepdad’s mom was doing one thing, I was doing one thing, my mom was doing another thing, and his sister was doing something else. We were all baking turkeys. It is kind of hard because you are having to plan a dinner right at the last minute. We had it in a hall. Oh, my God, my stepdad comes from a big family. There were a lot of people. I’m going to say three, four hundred people. His mother has ten sisters, maybe four brothers. Mostly the immediate family was preparing something. People tend to come in and say, “Whatever you need help with, let me know.” So those are the ones you ask for help. Those are the ones you get to serve. Then you try and pay people to help you, and they just won’t take your money. I remember there was a lady helping us, Danielle Jiron.6 She was helping us, and I told her, “Here, let me write you a check.” She said, “I don’t want your money.” “Danielle, but you did a lot.” “But he was my compadre,” she says. “I can’t take your money.” I wrote her out a check, and she tore it up right in front of me. A lot of people just help out of the goodness of their hearts.

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HELEN RUYBAL ON FAREWELL DINNERS

The mortuary people invite people for those dinners: “The family would like to invite you come and eat with us”—at the Senior Center, or at the high school, or at La Jara Church, or Manassa; they have big dinner places. So they invite the people. And if you don’t get invited, you know you’re welcome. Then from the cemetery you go to the dinner, and there you’re visiting like you’re at a party. [There is] regular food, like meats and potatoes and gravies and corn and tamales and tacos—well, they don’t come with every meal, because they’re hard to get ready a bunch of, and you don’t want to make an overload. Then they have bread, or they have buns, and all kinds of meat—sliced ham, cheese, and another kind of cheese and another kind of ham. They roast a turkey, and then they slice it, and you just take one piece or two. Sometimes they have servers. I get my plate, and you give me meat, and you give me chili. You give me salad. But most of the bigger ones, like yesterday, they already had the plates ready and you pass by and they give you a plate, and whatever is there, you take it or leave it. The plates are stacked up here in the front, and silverware, and then you pass, and they just give you a plate, until you get to the end. And then you take your salad and your chili, if you want it, and then as you get out of the door of the serving area, you get your coffee, or your punch, and you go and sit wherever you want to. If you want to sit by me, I look for you. Oh, they used [red chili] for these wedding dinners that they have, or farewell dinners, and in almost all of them they have it, and they serve it in little cereal dishes. If you want some, they fill it up for you, or they fill quite a few and put them on the side and people would just grab one. I don’t eat that at the farewell dinners because I have too much to eat, but some people go for a second helping. They have the red chili almost every time. They put the chili there with meat, ground meat, and beans. They also have green chili. Some people want both—you’re just not limited. You can have red or green. Green chili is very expensive to serve. The red chile is out of a pack—you get oodles of packs—but the green chile doesn’t go that far. You have to roast it and peel it and squeeze the seeds out, and some people want the seeds in. Occasionally they have green chili, but they always have red. There’s a lady who figures it all out. How many people do you expect? This lady, it’s usually Flora Romero, from outside town, she’s an expert at that. She says, we’ll need this many loaves of bread, this many

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pounds of—sometimes they have a roast, sliced. And then they name the workers, the one who prepares the ham, the one who prepares the turkey, the one who prepares the potatoes and gravy and corn. They have beans and chili lately. [They have tortillas] from the store, sometimes, mostly bread, and buns. This girl who plans it, Flora, she’s paid, I don’t know how much. They said $100. The other girls, some of them are relatives, [who work for] free. Some of them are hired, and some of them belong to organizations, like the Knights of Columbus or something like that. They name their group. There’s usually about five of them for each meal. This [main] girl decides how many pounds of meat, how many pounds of turkey, and she figures. But she has to know more or less how many people are expected, or else you have a not-right serving, only a little bit at the end for those who come late. There are some good planners who come pretty close to enough, and if they have too much, there is an auction—the pies and the turkey, a bunch of things. Like if I went and [my son] Ben didn’t go and I wanted to bring something good, I’d buy it there. You just go into the kitchen section where they serve, you ask for what you want, they fix dinner plates, they wrap them up with tinfoil, you pay, and then you take them home. You pay for those, but for the big meal you don’t pay anything. [You pay] about $2.00 or $1.50. It depends on the buyer. Some of them pay some more, because it is usually for the benefit of the church, I think, or for the benefit of the owners of the group. When they have a lot [left over], sometimes they have pies, and carne—meat. Everything that was left in good condition, they buy it. A lot of people come home with two plates, for themselves or for some of the family. They say that they sell them all. [At the farewell dinner] you just visit and visit. Then, after that, the owners of the funeral they go home and pine about things and talk about what they’re going to do.

Rending and Mending Community Van Gennep (1960, 164–165) has suggested that postfuneral meals were among the most important rites of incorporation: “Their purpose is to reunite all the surviving members of the group with each other, and sometimes also with the deceased, in the same way that a chain which has been broken by the disappearance of one of its links must be rejoined.” Helen Ruybal’s narrative about Mexicano funeral traditions and ritual meals made clear their importance to renewing the links of

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Mexicano culture. She contrasted them with the meager Mormon postfuneral reception, the Hispanic Presbyterian funeral feast, and the attitudes of an Assembly of God preacher. HELEN RUYBAL ON DIFFERENT FUNERAL TRADITIONS

Helen Ruybal began by speaking about the meaning of the farewell dinner for the mourning family members. They feel glad that you accompanied them, and that you appreciated the invitation, and that you went to be with them until the last minute. That’s the way it is. Some, like the Mormons—we went to a funeral, and they had the silver but just water and cake. I think that’s all they served, cake and no drinks, nothing, no coffee, no punch. Water, water and cake. [The Presbyterians] serve a full meal like all the others. They have a steady group, and they fix and they buy and they serve a full meal, and everybody goes. It’s supposed to be for the ones who go to the funeral, not for all the town. I didn’t like [the funeral meal] at first, for this reason, that when I worked in the adult basic [education program], I had a minister, Mr. Bocheo, he used to be a minister of the Assembly of God Church. He used to be a good man, a nice man, and friendly and religious. Anyway, he told us, “The funeral was nice, but one thing I can’t approve of is this meal for the public.” At that time we were having them at a lodge house here in town that’s closed now. “I don’t approve of those meals,” he said, “because you’re supposed to have those meals for relatives that come from far, for close friends that go to church.” “But here,” he says, “now you watch and see, all the men passing by in the street, coming in and eating, coming to shop, and they just come to eat—those who aren’t invited.” He used to say that, and it was true. People coming in town to go to the post office, they’d stop and eat, and he didn’t like that. He said, “It’s for relatives who come from far, or relatives from around home, who go to it and tend to the funeral, but not for people who go by.” But I know it’s expected.

Helen understood the outsider’s perspective of wanting to limit the meal to people who had been close to the deceased. In her community, however, it was expected that people would share the funeral meal with all who came. Funeral feasts in Antonito were intended to renew the

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ties of community after the loss of a link; hence they had to be open. Helen highlighted a difference between Hispanic food sharing and Anglo restricted commensality, something that Martha Mondragon had also noted.7 TEDDY MADRID ON PRESBYTERIAN FUNERAL FEASTS

The Presbyterian church in Mogote that Teddy Madrid had attended during her childhood was no longer used regularly, so the congregation worshiped and held events at the Presbyterian church in Antonito. Teddy described the funeral dinners, comparing and contrasting them with Catholic customs. The velorio was definitely not the tradition of the Presbyterian Church. The velorio was the Catholic. But we participated in some velorios. I did go to the velorio of my friend’s father at his house when I was in high school. They did have a velorio for my maternal grandmother at her house. But that was Presbyterian. We spent the night there. My maternal grandmother had gotten used to my combing and brushing her hair. She had beautiful long silver-white hair. She couldn’t stand for anyone else to brush or comb her hair. So they insisted that I go and brush and comb her hair every day. I was with her a lot during that last year she lived. I would do her hair, and she loved it. So when she passed away that night, they did take her to the mortuary. All her sisters went, and they dressed her, and she was ready. Then they came for me. They said, “You can go and prepare her hair.” I went, and I had to prepare my grandmother’s hair. I brushed it and laid it out the way I used to prepare it for her. They brought her home, and we had that velorio, a little velorio. Then the next day her funeral was at the Presbyterian church. Her favorite hymn was “Sweet Hour of Prayer,” and they made me sing it. Funerals, a very big dinner after, like for my sister’s, my dad’s, my mom’s, my nephew’s, my grandmother’s. The biscochitos, the meat, the chili, the beans, the posol, those were the traditional meals, cakes and cookies. It was usually the family [who cooked], and people would bring [food]. Now, in our church, what we do is the family can provide the basic dish, whatever meat or whatever they want, and then we will provide salads and beans and chili, posol, anything that they want. We’ll provide tortillas. We’ll provide bread. But we found that the families more and more just foot the bill. We can fit in [our church] about seventy people crowded. If it is in the summertime, like for my dad’s funeral

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there were many people and we used that [outside] area. We have a large kitchen. Anything that we need to cook, we have a huge oven. We have big pots and pans. We have a big coffee urn. We have plates.

The Hispanic Presbyterians shared with the Hispanic Catholics the tradition of holding a full meal after the funeral. Through shared commensal traditions, Mexicanas of Antonito identified across religious differences and defined themselves as distinct from their Anglo neighbors, showing how foodways played a crucial role in ethnic identity and boundaries, as Mary Douglas pointed out in her classic work, Purity and Danger (1966). JANICE DEHERRERA ON THE MEANING OF FOOD AT FUNERALS

The idea there is to make people eat, to be the first time that you come out of your grief. Once you’ve gone through the funeral and bury them, then you’re trying to move forward. The idea is that we have this dinner so that the grieving people will take their first bites of food, and they come out of this. Because usually you lose your appetite and you’re grieving and you don’t want to eat and you’re saddened, so the dinner was the time when everybody is around you and comforting you. You know all the people there, and it’s kind of like a bringing back to living and Earth.

Conclusion That many mourning rituals, including those in Antonito, ended not with the burial but with the funeral banquet emphasized the continuing cycle of life following death and the community’s rebounding from loss (Thursby 2006, 32). Janice DeHerrera’s words reflected her community’s active and conscious reaffirmation through feasting after a death. Mexicanas recognized that commensality brought both physical and spiritual nurturance.8 It enabled community members to do something for the people who were suffering and nourished the mourners through the crisis of loss. The collective meals extended the behaviors and feelings usually associated with private family life into the public sphere and brought the community into the closer web of connection more commonly associated with the home. Antonito Mexicanas were proud of their food-sharing tradition and valued it as an example of their generosity and caring for others in a time of crisis. We turn now to how Mexicanas dealt with hunger—another threat to their community.

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“Give Because It Multiplies”

Hunger and Response in Antonito

Poverty and Food Insecurity Poverty and food insecurity were a threat not only to individuals but also to community ideals of equality and collective responsibility—ideals encapsulated in the words of Carmen Lopez: “The thing that the elderly people used to say is this, ‘Give because it multiplies.’ I really think that it happens.” The people I interviewed said that the poor did not go hungry for several reasons: there was a caring community; there was both government and private assistance; and the traditional diet was cheap, available, and nutritious. But poverty was widespread, jobs were hard to get, some people suffered from physical and mental impairments, and a few people were struggling to get enough good food to eat. Conejos was one of the poorest counties in the nation. In 2004 a staggering 19.1 percent of people in Conejos County lived below the poverty line, compared to 10.2 percent in Colorado and 12.7 percent in the United States. In 2005 the annual median personal income per capita for Conejos County was $18,875, barely over half the Colorado figure of $37,510 and the U.S. figure of

$34,471.1 The Colorado Fiscal Policy Institute (n.d.) reported that between March 2006 and February 2007 approximately 220,000 Coloradans were food insecure and 251,000 (5.3 percent) were on food stamps, an increase of more than 61 percent since 2000. In Conejos County the average monthly Food Stamp caseload was 614 of approximately 8,500 inhabitants (Colorado Fiscal Policy Institute n.d.). One 2006 study reported that 12 percent of Colorado households were food insecure (Nord, Andrews, and Carlson 2006).2 But in Antonito even people who had little money could eat culturally appropriate and adequate though perhaps monotonous foods and benefit from the fact that food sharing was normative in their culture. Although they acknowledged envy and discord, many people agreed with Janice DeHerrera, who said, “Nobody who has food will deny somebody who’s hungry who asks for food.” There were several safeguards against hunger: school breakfast and lunch programs, the food bank in the basement of St. Augustine Church, Senior Citizens’ Center lunches, and Meals on Wheels for elderly shut-ins. As Janice put it, “We don’t have a lot of money, but I would say we’re not poor, because we don’t have any homeless, and there’s nobody starving, and we have a food bank.” BERNADETTE VIGIL ON CARING AND HUNGER

Bernadette Vigil remembered growing up in Antonito in the 1950s. She painted an idyllic picture of her people taking care of each other to combat the rare cases of extreme poverty. It was wonderful, being brought up in Antonito was, oh, it was wonderful. We didn’t know what prejudice was; we didn’t know what hunger was—no matter how poor everybody was, you didn’t know what hunger was. You knew who your neighbor was, and who helped who, and everybody got along with everybody, everybody, all the kids. We were poor, but, hey, we didn’t lack anything. And if we were missing anything, I sure didn’t know about it. None of us did. There was this woman, and she was real, real poor. Her husband went completely insane one day. Completely insane. She was left with fifteen kids. They would kill birds. What were they doing with birds? Why would they want to kill birds? Well, we didn’t know, but they were eating them. They would kill them, pluck them, and eat them. We had no idea. Little birds. So then we told my daddy. And my daddy says, “I don’t believe this.” So he went and he told Mr. Daniels who owned the

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grocery store. Mr. Daniels wanted to go see, so they went to go see, and sure enough they were so poor. There was no welfare at that time. There were no social services, there was no nothing. So from that day Mr. Daniels would let her come in and get whatever she needed.

JANICE DEHERRERA ON TRADITIONS OF SHARING FOOD

Community beneficence helped people to survive poverty before there were formal institutions to help them. Janice DeHerrera related a story her father had told her about his youth and then went on to talk about how as a young adult she used to feed the homeless when she lived in Albuquerque and was learning to cook. In Albuquerque there was this blind man—he was my dad’s neighbor. They didn’t have welfare or food stamps in those days, before the war. My dad was a little kid. His mother had a deep conscience, and she told him to take the man to go beg for food. My dad would take him once a month. They would get a little wagon that they used to bring wood in, and he would pull the wagon door to door, and he’d ask people, and they’d give him a couple pounds of beans, of rice, and somebody else would give him flour. That was their welfare system. [When I was learning to cook] I started feeding the homeless because they’d smell [my] cooking all day, and they would come to the house and ask for food. I wouldn’t let them in because I was always kind of afraid. But I would tell them to go around to the other side, and I would make them a plate and told them that they could eat in privacy, in a little patio yard that was fenced off. I told them they could eat there. I’d get a lot of homeless people knocking on the door. It was real strange. But I always think those were God-breezes or God-sends. A lot of people got to eat my first foods.

Traditional Foodways, Sharing, and Making Do The ethos of sharing food had deep roots in the Mexicano culture. Teddy Madrid pointed out that with hard work and resourcefulness, ranching and farming families could get plenty to eat from cultivated and wild foods but that families that suffered from alcoholism or neglect or the death of the breadwinner were in danger of going hungry, which they overcame with the help of food gifts. The traditional diet was cheaply available and stretched a long way.

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TEDDY MADRID ON HUNGER, SCARCITY, AND SHARING

Very early I became aware that there were some men in the community who did not provide for their families. They were alcoholics, and it was sad to see them not provide for their families. But then, we were so sheltered. Our place was big enough that we could be sheltered because, my dad had somewhat like thirty acres to begin with. So we had all of that to roam. We were instructed that that was our domain. We had everything—my dad was a good provider for my mom. He made life easier every turn that he could; he made life easier for her and therefore for us. But I was aware that there were some men who did not provide for their families simply because of alcohol. I detest that because I saw it from childhood. I also saw it when I was teaching as a nineteen-yearold in Mogote. For example, I had one child in my class who was so thin and so skinny and [had] dark circles under her eyes. I would ask her, “Did you bring a lunch?” All the kids would either go home for lunch, or they would bring a lunch. She did not bring a lunch, and she did not go home. So I would watch her as she would hide. She knew I was watching her. She would hide behind the house during the lunch hour. I would bring things for her, but she wouldn’t eat. I think her stomach had shrunk. And then I had the same child here in Antonito, older, when the schools consolidated. That child had learned almost not to eat because then she had free lunches, and she wouldn’t, she didn’t like anything. She wouldn’t eat. The churches did not provide food. The mothers, it depended on how astute the mothers were, and how really intelligent they were to do this. They learned to use a lot of, for example, the wild spinach. They would get that, and they would learn. They would either dry it or can it. So they would have the wild spinach, they would have the champes for jelly. There was one lady in particular, her husband was an alcoholic. She was from our church. The church hired her to be the janitor, and so she took care of the church, and then her children grew up. They took them to McCurdy [School],3 and so they were educated, and all of them became very successful. But there were hardships for some of those families. And many of the men did not leave the community to go out and look for work. They ate quelites, yes. We called it the wild spinach. They would pick that. They would also pick the verdolagas, the little round greens. They

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would have their own onions. So, in a sense, many of them were vegetarians, but there were also the rabbits. At that time, it wasn’t hard to kill rabbits. And there was fish, if the kids would go fish. Now, Vincent’s father died when he was seven years old. And my mother-in-law was left with Vincent, two brothers, and two sisters. She was only thirtythree, I think. So she was very young with this large family to raise. She could sew. She could cook. She hired herself out. Then Vincent remembers going early in the morning to the river and catching fish, and rabbit hunting. Then the older brother, he was only seventeen when he joined the navy, and he would send the money to their mother, and Vincent did the same thing. He joined the army and went to Korea, and he sent all this money to his mother. So they cared for her, but I can just imagine how difficult her life must have been with raising her children, and she did, she raised them; they’re so sweet. I mean, they’re tough. I shouldn’t say they’re sweet; they’re tough, they’re survivors, they’re survivors. [My grandmother] took care of people who had no way of eating. She also took in her sister-in-law when her husband became ill. My father said that when they needed food they would go over there, and they would give them flour, they would give them whatever. They would also pick piñon, and so they would have stacks and sacks of piñon. My mother said that my maternal grandmother would swallow her pride in the winter and send my aunts for flour and sugar. But in turn she would share the milk. They had milk cows and milk and butter and things like that. Oh, there was a lot of sharing. I didn’t tell you this, but my maternal grandmother became a widow very young in age. My mother’s father passed away when she was a year old, and left my mother and two brothers. Then [my maternal grandmother] remarried, and they had a stepfather. He was kind to my mother but not kind at all to the boys. My mother’s brother had to go and herd sheep. My maternal grandmother had to walk about a mile to work for a lady and help out at the house, and this lady would give her food. So that was a hardship on her. But there was no hunger because my grandmother had land, and she had it covered with all kinds of bushes, berry bushes and asparagus and wild flowers and all kinds of things in the land. And they were hardworking people. The men were good. The men had hard lives. Not all of them drank. The ones I know who I’m talking about, like my dad, my step-grandfather, they were not drinkers. They did not drink. They were good providers. But the women, I think, were very strong, very, very strong. They were very small, but they were hardworking people. Everyone worked.

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JANICE DEHERRERA ON MAKING DO WITH BEANS, TORTILLAS, AND POTATOES

Janice DeHerrera said that even in recent times the traditional diet was inexpensive to purchase. In addition, potatoes could be had at no cost if one was willing to glean them. People around here don’t need much. A lot of them aren’t starving here, because of the tradition-based food of beans, tortillas, and potatoes. Potatoes are a hundred pounds for $8 or $10. There are a lot of meals with a hundred pounds of potatoes. A hundred pounds of beans, $10; you can’t eat a hundred pounds of beans in one year. We tried. We ate eighty pounds, and that was a lean year, when we didn’t have much money. If you eat beans and chili everyday there is no stigma to that. You probably have all kinds of money left over if that’s all you eat. So there is no stigma to anything. There is no stigma to eating burritos, one of the cheapest foods you can make. If you have a little bit of money you can get by, because there is food around. There are plenty of potatoes everywhere. If the field is empty according to the potato grower and then you just go in and dig, kick around the dirt a little bit, you’ll find potatoes hidden in there. You just take what’s left over. Sometimes people won’t pick them up because maybe they got cut. Of course, you don’t want to get cut ones, but sometimes that’s what’s left over. Then try and look for some that are not cut that are hidden in the dirt somewhere. You just go pick them up. It’s hard work. The one time I went, I didn’t like it. Then after that Ted just took the kids. They had all kinds of energy. Then there are people who go and do it, and then they come and take their little box and try to sell them, to the people. So they come to our house and ask us if we’ll buy their gleaned potatoes. That is something to do; there’s a lot of food if you are starving. It isn’t necessarily yummy food, but you won’t starve.

Yolanda Salazar confirmed Janice’s assertion that the Antonito diet itself was a safeguard against hunger: “I guess you can get by with your beans, and chili and potatoes and tortillas, as long as you have all that. You figure you get a ten-pound bag of beans, how long is that going to take you? It takes you a long way.”

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Hunger in School Although food was available in the environment and the traditional diet was inexpensive to purchase, there was still hunger. At her job at the elementary school, Janice DeHerrera saw evidence of hungry children, which she attributed to parental neglect. But there was a safety net: free breakfasts and highly subsidized lunches when school was in session, and an ethos of community care. JANICE DEHERRERA ON HUNGER IN THE ELEMENTARY SCHOOL

In the school that I work in, there are a couple kids who are not getting enough nutrition. I think that it is laziness of the parents. The mothers are lazy, and they have boyfriends, and they drink and go out. I know the children have malnutrition because they’re skinny little things. But when they come to school they ask for seconds for breakfast, and they go like three times for lunch. And on Mondays, Mondays, they go hurry to get in that line like they haven’t had enough food during the weekend. One of them told me that her mother did not want to make her any suppers. I asked her, “Oh, were you a bad girl?” like if she was punished. And she says, “No, my dad made her mad.” So they don’t even think beyond that, but you have to feed your kids even when they make you mad. But on poverty I think that there are people in here that could be in that position, but our community does not allow it. First of all, we are losing money in our cafeteria, and the school takes the loss, a big loss. I mean major big, big moneys to keep the food program the way it is, and they keep it low, like it’s 50 cents. And you know everyplace it is $1.50 or $1.25 for lunch if you come with people with needs, but for our children it’s only 50 cents, and everybody gets to eat breakfast. Nobody has to come to school hungry or be in school hungry because they have a free breakfast, no matter their income. So we know that the kids, at least four days a week, are getting good nutrition.4 Even at that you’re not going to get malnourished. And then they never deny kids seconds or thirds, unless they are not eating [what’s on] their plate and only coming for cake. But if they are eating their food, and they go and take their tray and show that they’ve eaten all their food or most of it, they’ll give them more food. So nobody is denied seconds or thirds. That is just in the school program.

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I don’t think that anybody’s hungry. I don’t know, for some reason people will tell you if they are hungry. They’ll come to the principal and tell them. This one little girl, the lady didn’t have very much money, and they moved in, and the mother said that they had to spend all the money on the deposit to get the apartment and that she couldn’t afford any crayons and stuff the kid needed for school. I told her that’s OK. I’ll get her some. I went to the secretary and told her the situation, and she gave me what she had. Whatever she didn’t have I went and bought for the kid. I didn’t buy her a backpack, just the stuff she needed for the classroom. We went around asking people for stuff.

The Antonito Food Bank In addition to help from community members, government assistance was available to the poor and hungry in the form of Food Stamps, the Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) Program, the Commodity Food Program, and the Emergency Food Assistance Program, but not everyone in need was eligible or willing to apply for these forms of assistance.5 The Colorado Food Stamp application, for example, was twenty-one pages long. For local people, the food bank at the Catholic church was an important barrier against hunger. I interviewed Tina Casias, then the church administrator, twice about the food bank. She said it had about thirty clients, who could come six times per year. Tina encouraged them to come every other month to spread the food out over the year, but she said sometimes they came six months in a row. The policy was to allow clients to pick a specified number of items depending on the size of the family, as follows: one person, 15 items; two people, 25 items; three people, 35 items; four people, 45 items; five or more people, 55 items. Of all the food banks around, Tina thought theirs was the most lenient. Many of the others provided prepacked bags. But because the Antonito Food Bank realized that people had different tastes and perhaps health problems such as high blood pressure, diabetes, or allergies, its policy was to allow clients to choose what they wanted and needed. Tina said that the Food Bank had “everything,” and she took me to the church basement to see it. We walked through a church hall floored in red linoleum, and at one end were two freezers. The freezers were old and not very big, about 4´ × 3´ × 2´. She opened the first one, and inside were a few packages of hot dogs, eight or ten packages of hamburgers, and sliced turkey breast. Tina limited people to two packages of meat per visit to ensure that there was enough for everyone. In the second freezer was

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Antonito Food Bank shelves in 2004.

bread of various types: sandwich bread, rolls, hamburger and hot dog buns, and processed breads. Next Tina took me over to a padlocked door in the wall, which had a sign that read: PLEASE DO NOT STACK ANYTHING AT THIS DOOR. IT IS THE FOOD BANK. Tina unlocked the door, and we entered a bright, clean, wellorganized room with shelves containing a bounty of different foods, welcoming clients to choose items to feed themselves. There were many staples, including flour, sugar, dried milk, rice, dried pinto beans, yellow masa, and oats. There were several kinds of canned vegetables and fruit—pumpkin, green beans, peas, corn, cranberries, pears, and peaches. There were some processed items—macaroni and cheese, salad dressing, mayonnaise, Hamburger Helper, Stove-Top dressing, and several canned soups. The Alamosa food bank bought items in bulk and bagged them, and when Tina received cash donations, she gave the money to Alamosa in return for the equivalent in bulk goods. Tina said the church received donations from all over. The Alamosa and Denver food banks sent regular shipments, but Denver once sent them a load with lots of candy and sweet cereal, and it was infested with mice. A local arts group, Arco Iris, donated nonfood items such as paper towels, napkins, toothbrushes, toothpaste, and toilet paper, all

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of which the clients could choose from. The Catholic and Presbyterian congregations had regular food drives. TEDDY MADRID ON PRESBYTERIAN SUPPORT OF THE FOOD BANK

[At the Presbyterian church] we continue to support the food bank. The first week of the month, everyone brings their food or money, whichever they prefer. My sister is in charge of it, and she brings it down to the [Catholic] church. The Presbyterian church in Pueblo grants our church a hunger fund. I think they’ll give us somewhere around $300 to $500 a year. Two or three ladies will go to the grocery store—we patronize our local grocery store, and we buy the groceries there. On Superbowl Sunday, we have a Superbowl food bank day, and this year all the people who came to church brought cans. Some bring soup, others bring salmon, other cans, whatever it is, and some give money. It gives us satisfaction, spiritual satisfaction, that we can help someone else. Food is something that families need, that children need. Without food, they will not thrive. They need it.

In accord with the attitude that food is a basic need, access to the food bank was straightforward and immediate. In contrast to the complicated bureaucratic procedures necessary for getting government food stamps, food bank clients merely had to be residents of southern Conejos County and fill out an application, which included name, address, phone number, social security number, family members, and income. Verification of income was not required. Tina Casias said, “The needy are honest.” She added, “If they’re coming here, they need it.” Immediately on filling out the application, clients could obtain food. All kinds of people used the food bank: a family with two disabled parents and several children, a single mother with six children, elderly people, and alcoholics. JANICE DEHERRERA ON HUNGER, CONSCIENCE, AND THE FOOD BANK

The [Catholic] church has a food bank. People in the community [contribute], like Schmitz, he gives [sports] cards, free cards, to any kids if they bring cans of food, and then he turns them in to the food bank. The church has drives for food all the time. They ask people to bring in canned food or pasta or anything they have. In the past we had this priest who came in and said, “The only people who are going to get free food from the food bank are people who

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have food stamps.” He put a requirement, and that got everybody mad, a lot of people mad. It got me mad because some people won’t go for food stamps because they don’t want the government to know anything about them. Sometimes somebody’s husband used the food budget for liquor, and they’re still within the income where they wouldn’t qualify for food stamps. So they would be denied—they’re not going to eat for a week until they get another paycheck, or two weeks. We do feed a lot of alcoholics. They aren’t going to get more money from us. They are going to get real food. There’s people who are barely making it and something else came up. They’ve got to go to the doctor or something, and then they don’t have money for food. So I don’t believe they should have restrictions. The altar servers go and ask for food from people. They can’t have perishable foods; they need nonperishable. Then what other things do we have? At Christmas and Thanksgiving we have this Share program that comes through the Catholic church, and they order 50 or 75 or 100 boxes for people who are needy. This person should have a Thanksgiving box because [the family] had a fire in their house, or the husband just lost his job or something like that. So we have a lot of ways. Our conscience is stronger than the law. Nobody who has food will deny somebody who’s hungry who asks for food.

Conclusion Mexicanas in the Antonito area have always been instrumental in food distribution, which has given them a public role and status in the community.6 Like the Chicana community organizers in East Los Angeles, they “link family concerns to a wider network of resources” and “bridge the social distance that separates residents” (Pardo 2000, 108).7 Like the East L.A. Chicanas, the women of Antonito were political actors in sharing food and combating hunger. With high unemployment in Conejos County and few job opportunities nearby, community support was essential to the survival of the needy. Particularly at risk were the elderly and children, for whom hunger had devastating consequences on health and growth (Marshall et al. 1999). Women were the primary agents of both informal practices of food sharing and formal institutions such as the Food Bank. These were important means of staving off hunger and maintaining values of mutual responsibility, particularly the community value on food security for all.

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11

Conclusion

“Our People Will Survive”

This book has used interviews with Mexicanas from the town of Antonito to document their evolving ranching-farming culture. Through their food-centered life histories, they have described their past and present diet, relation to land and water, gender roles in provisioning and cooking, and family and community relations surrounding commensality. Mexicanas have spoken throughout this book and unveiled how “one little thing brings out another one,” as Helen Ruybal said—how one thought about food can lead to extensive reflections on life. In the last of our seventeen interviews, when she was ninety-five years old, Helen said, “There are different kinds of people always.” Her comment reflected her general attitude toward life and was a fitting encapsulation of one of the messages of this book. Even in a town of less than nine hundred inhabitants, there was a wide range of people with different opportunities, attitudes, and identities. The women I interviewed did not speak as one voice for the whole community, but together they painted a picture of the food culture of a long-standing Mexicano community in the Southwest. It was grounded in local production of key staples

supplemented by foods grown in nearby northern New Mexico. Women played an essential role in producing and preparing food, whether they were housewives, gardeners, or wage earners, or all three. They developed deep roots in the land through living and working on it. Their economic activity earned them respect and value, and they played important roles in family and community through cooking and providing food, activities that were sometimes a burden and sometimes a pleasure. The Hispanic farmer-ranchers maintained a sustainable existence on the land from the mid-nineteenth through the mid-twentieth century. Families like Helen Ruybal’s, Ramona Valdez’s, and Teddy Madrid’s were able to produce almost all of what they ate, as well as some foods for sale. The diet consisted of beans and potatoes, fresh and dried wild and cultivated fruits and vegetables, locally raised or wild meat, chili peppers, and bread or wheat tortillas. These foods derived from Mexican American culinary traditions, a fusion of Spanish and Native American cuisines adapted to the local ecology, high altitude, and cold climate. By the turn of the new millennium, Mexicanas were experiencing many alterations in their foodways that were linked to changes in their culture and the broader world. The Antonito diet showed the continuing influences of Mexicano culinary traditions and local farming and ranching, as well as the increasing incursion of “American” cuisine and products of the global food economy. Their foodways fell along three axes: Spanish/Mexicano versus American/Anglo; homemade versus processed; and local versus global. Different families ate at different points on these axes, consuming at different times of the day or year foods that ranged from the age-old staples of beans, chili, and potatoes to hamburgers, macaroni, pizza, pop, and fast food. As they consumed a diet with diverse culinary strands, the people of Antonito defined various dimensions of their Hispanic and American selves.

The Fourth of July Meal The Fourth of July feast was an exemplar of contemporary foodways in Antonito that interwove diverse culinary and cultural threads. It was a major holiday celebrated with a big outdoor meal, usually centered on a barbecue.1 By participating in this holiday, Mexicanos acted out their ideals of U.S. national identity, their patriotism, and their cultural belonging. We went to many Fourth of July parties during our decade in Antonito. On the Fourth of July in 2000, my husband and sons and I attended a gathering at the home of our friend José Inez (Joe) Taylor. I

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baked chocolate chip cookies, and Jim made a big fruit salad of watermelon, cantaloupe, and honeydew melon. We arrived at Joe’s and found his two daughters and son with their spouses and children. A range of friends, relatives, and in-laws came and went. Joe’s son-in-law manned the barbecue and grilled hamburgers, hot dogs, sausages, bratwurst, steaks, and ribs. People contributed an array of “American” dishes—potato salad, potato chips, carbonated sodas, a supermarket vegetable tray, pasta salad, and buns for the hamburgers and hot dogs—and “Mexicano” dishes—red chili, green chili, pinto beans, guacamole, menudo, pozole (pork and hominy stew), sopaipillas, and flour tortillas. After thirty or so adults and children arrived, Joe urged us to fill our plates from the many dishes arrayed around his kitchen. Then we sat at a large table set up in Joe’s backyard, under a tarp to protect us from the brilliant San Luis Valley sun, enjoying the slight breeze and crisp air. We passed a leisurely afternoon working our way through the food and chatting with Joe’s friends and relatives—enjoying the conviviality of the holiday meal.

Unpacking the Fourth of July Meal The Fourth of July meal, like the Antonito diet in general, contained homemade and processed, Mexicano and American, and local and global foods. Meat was a key item—typically, barbecued beef and pork, especially the ubiquitous hamburgers and hot dogs. Many Hispanics in Antonito named meat as an important dietary staple, past and present. Many people still ate local beef from relatives’ cattle and venison or elk hunted by male family members. Martha Mondragon, her parents, and her four siblings slaughtered one of the family steers two or three times a year and shared the meat. Teddy Madrid’s family always had elk in the freezer. But a lot of people in Antonito bought meat at the supermarket and had no idea of its provenance. Meat crossed the categories local and global, Mexicano/Spanish and Anglo/American food, depending on where it came from, how it was cooked, and where and with whom it was eaten. By 2006 hardly anyone in Antonito tended gardens anymore, so most people most of the time ate globally produced plant foods such as those in the supermarket vegetable tray Joe’s daughter brought to the Fourth of July party. Whether purchased at Antonito’s locally owned Hometown Market or a chain supermarket in Alamosa thirty miles north, fruits and vegetables came from factory farms all over the globe—California,

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Florida, Mexico, and South America. Today there is little subsistence or market-oriented fruit and vegetable production in Conejos County. According to the 2002 census of agriculture, far and away the principal crop in terms of acreage was forage for livestock (43,700 acres), followed by barley (5,600 acres, mostly for beer), potatoes (1,200 acres), wheat (900 acres), and oats (450 acres).2 In terms of livestock, cattle dominated with 25,000 units, followed by sheep (11,000), bee colonies (2,000), horses and ponies (1,500), and laying hens (750). According to census estimates, in 2005 less than 2 percent of the population of Conejos County was working in “farming/fishing/forestry.”3 Rather than support a local sustainable food-centered economy, Conejos County’s agriculture produced cash crops for external markets—evidenced by truck after truck loaded with hay that continuously rolled through Antonito headed south. The only locally grown vegetable regularly available in Antonito was potatoes, a major cash crop in the San Luis Valley. In their culinary versatility, potatoes reflected multicultural influences on the local cuisine. In the Mexicano tradition people ate them fried—in lard in the old days but in olive or vegetable oil in recent times. In the American tradition, Antonito folks ate potatoes mashed with roasts or boiled in potato salad. In the industrialized food tradition, people ate lots of fast-food fried potatoes and potato chips. At the Fourth of July party, people in Antonito ate grain products from several culinary streams. They consumed wheat tortillas, bread, hot dog and hamburger buns, and sopaipillas. They also ate wheat in the form of pasta salad or in the form of spaghetti and macaroni (Counihan 2002, 297). These pasta products had their origins in the cuisine brought to America by Sicilian and southern Italian immigrants in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.4 But pasta as well as pizza had penetrated so deeply into U.S. foodways that people in Antonito defined them not as “Italian” but as “American.” The main beverage at Joe’s party was “pop” or “soda”—sweetened, flavored, carbonated drinks that are consumed in staggering amounts in Antonito and across the United States—more than 55 gallons per capita in 1999 (Putnam 2000). This was a postwar phenomenon, and Ramona Valdez said that when she was a child she never drank pop. By the turn of the millennium, its consumption had skyrocketed, and it was present not only at special occasions such as Joe’s Fourth of July party but also on a daily basis in many homes and all restaurants. It epitomized the processed foods consumed in increasing amounts in Antonito and across the nation, foods that often are high in calories and low in nutritional

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value. By drinking pop, people in Antonito participated in national cuisine and culture, but they also increased their risk of diabetes the rates of which were skyrocketing among Hispanics and Native Americans (Gladwell 1998; Herrera 2001; Nabhan 2004). Diabetes was a growing problem among Mexicanos in the San Luis Valley, striking Hispanic males at more than twice the rate of Anglos and Hispanic females at almost five times the rate of Anglos.5 On the Fourth of July Mexicanos in Antonito highlighted the social and geographic context of the meal, as well as certain foods. Extended families came together from far and wide and renewed their ties. Many groups camped in the nearby San Juan Mountains for the long weekend. Others ate at one of many beautiful picnic spots or in their backyards. It was telling that on this holiday of national identity and belonging, Antonito Mexicanos reaffirmed their roots in the land and their claims to place by making a point of eating outdoors.

Explanations for the Antonito Diet My ethnographic research in Antonito revealed several important forces that affected where people ate along the three continua of local/global, Mexicano/American, homemade/processed. One was accessibility. People ate foods that were available, whether by purchase, exchange, production, or gift. Over the past sixty years, local horticulture and gathering have declined to almost zero in Antonito, and, like most Americans, people purchased almost all their food.6 I knew only one person who had a vegetable garden in Antonito. The reasons people gave for no longer gardening were that water was too expensive and gardening was too much work. Perhaps also gardening was negatively associated with poverty. Some people did, however, continue to produce and consume local meat. They acquired beef from their own or relatives’ cattle, as Martha Mondragon and Janice DeHerrera did. Families welcomed the important contribution of game to the diet. Hunting was an important male-bonding activity, and an important milestone for an adolescent boy was killing his first deer or elk. People were enthusiastic about the superior quality and taste, as well as the lower cost, of locally raised or hunted meat. But, by and large, most people ate meat—as well as produce—from the global food industry because that was the most easily available. Many people in Antonito still preferred local fruits and vegetables and purchased them when possible. In the late summer Antonito’s Hometown

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Antonito’s Hometown Market.

Alamosa Farmers’ Market.

Market sold and roasted green chili from New Mexico, which many locals bought, peeled, and froze to use all year in sauces and stews. Occasional vendors from northern New Mexico sold door-to-door local honey, piñon nuts, chicos, peaches, melons, green chiles, ground red chile, or the dramatic ristras—braided wreaths of the small bright red chile peppers. The recently opened Salazar Trading Post in Antonito sold some local foods: potatoes, tamales, meat, atole, panocha, bolita beans, beef, and buffalo meat. From July through early October, the Saturday Farmers’ Market in Alamosa sold a variety of local fruits, vegetables, and herbs. Several people I interviewed in Antonito made the sixty-mile round trip to Alamosa to purchase these foods, which they deemed better tasting, more nutritious, and culturally significant. Furthermore, as Monica Taylor said, “You want to try to help the local person.” The second force that affected food consumption was how it fit habits of time, space, and division of labor. The extent to which Antonito families ate homemade or processed foods depended on many factors, especially who was cooking, how much time he or she had, whether he or she defined cooking as oppressive or satisfying, and what economic resources were available. Processed foods shortened cooking time, although they were more expensive and almost always nutritionally inferior to fresh food. Meals were evolving as younger people lacked gardens, worked outside the home, and did not have as much time for cooking. For example, Martha Mondragon said, “I do whatever is easier for me,” drawing a contrast with her mother, who prepared everything from scratch, cooked a lot of beans, never ate fast food, and made sure the four food groups were represented. Although at dinner Martha tried to have a home-cooked meal—chili, caldito (hamburger and potato stew), or spaghetti—she admitted that she ate more processed, prepared, and “American” foods than her parents did, for example, cereal and “fastfood stuff” like hot dogs or frozen pizza. The third force affecting Antonito consumption was the intertwining of food and meaning. For public consumption at a party, cooks often made a special dish. Some made brand-new dishes to demonstrate their creativity; others developed a specialty that they made over and over. Still others made dishes that reinforced family identity. Some people made “traditional” dishes such as menudo or green chili to reveal their attachment to traditional culture. Eating Mexicano foods renewed ethnic affiliation, family roots, individual creativity, and ties to the land. Janice DeHerrera said, “Hispanic Mexicano foods are the ones that make everybody feel better emotionally. American, Americanized foods are

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foods that you eat to sustain yourself, and they’re easier, convenient and quick.” Mexicano foods tasted good and brought comfort, but they took time, cultural knowledge, and practice. Eating processed products involved the consumer in a standardized national cuisine and culture. At different times and occasions, people ate at different places along the culinary continua. Some people—especially older ones—appreciated the culture and values associated with Mexicano cuisine and had the time, habits, and ingredients to prepare it; others—especially younger folks—embraced the modern American world typified by fast, processed, and globalized food.

Toward the Future The consumption of global industrialized foods threatens Mexicanos’ distinct cultural identity. Food industrialization has altered taste and affected the associations embedded in diverse foods. At parties in Antonito most young people gobbled up hamburgers, potato chips, and soda but did not eat pozole and menudo, not liking the taste and not caring about their cultural distinctiveness. The reliance on foods produced all over the globe has accompanied and legitimized Mexicanos’ loss of land and water. In the analysis of the Antonito Fourth of July feast, we can see how food globalization has affected not only what people in Antonito eat but also how their changing foodways reflect a challenge to the survival of their culture and economic autonomy. As the Mexicanas who contributed to this book have made clear, their cuisine is rooted in land and place, dependent on access to water, and embedded in family, gender, and community relationships and values. Some key issues responsible for the changing diet in Antonito are the decline of home food production, changing values about appropriate meals, changing meanings of food, and time constraints. Forces contributing to a local, traditional diet were the Alamosa Farmers’ Market, the Salazar Trading Post featuring local products, the passing on of cultural knowledge, and the acequia movement, which has fostered preservation of acequia rights and practices and contributed to local food security and sustainability (Peña 2005, 165). Antonito Mexicanas’ stories about food, culture, and identity point to several unanswered questions. First, is a sustainable, land-based food culture feasible for Mexicanas/os in the future? What forms could it take? What changes in U.S. farm policy would support it? Do Mexicanas/os

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control sufficient land and water to create such a system? In what ways could such a food system serve the needs of Mexicanas/os for livingwage jobs near their homes? Second, what foods will today’s young people cook and eat? What part will men and women play? Will they forge positive relations through food? Will cooking be a pleasure or a burden, a job or an expectation? Will people have enough to eat? Third, how do the beliefs and behaviors surrounding the production, distribution, and consumption of food in Antonito contribute to the survival of Mexicano culture and identity? What are the cultural consequences of changes in diet? What are the cultural and ecological consequences of different land and water use strategies? What are the consequences of the increased consumption of processed and fast food on Mexicano culture and health? This book has sought to contribute to the survival of Mexicano culture and foodways by advancing Chicano environmentalism and Chicano cultural citizenship. By documenting their sustainable land-use practices, local diet, and meanings embedded in foodways, I hope to have shown how fully Antonito Mexicanas belong to their region. Using insights from Latina feminism and feminist ethnography, I have sought to build knowledge about women grounded in their insider perspectives and their diversity. Getting their stories out fosters the process of “telling to live” and contributes to the endurance of Antonito culture. Let me close with the wary optimism of Teddy Madrid, who decried the lack of jobs and opportunities for young people in Antonito but affirmed, “All I can say is that I think our people will survive, as a very unique people, simply because of this drive, this ability to survive, to live. I think maybe this little town may survive. I hope so. I hope.”

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Topics in Food-Centered Life Histories

Food-centered life histories are tape-recorded semistructured interviews with willing participants, focusing on experiences and memories about food production, preservation, preparation, cooking, distribution, and consumption. Main topics are listed below schematically; actual questions tend to be more informal, and may lead to further topics. How and by whom are foods produced, processed, and prepared? Who procures food, by what means, where, when, and at what cost? Is there home gardening, canning, drying, freezing, brewing, baking, and so on? Describe the garden, layout, plants, labor, yearly cycle. Is food exchanged or shared? Who cooks and with what principal foods, ingredients, spices, and combinations? What are some key recipes? What are people/you/your family eating? What is the quality of food? How does your family handle the food division of labor? Other families? How are male and female children being raised vis-à-vis food chores? Describe the kitchen, place in the home, appliances, cooking tools, and technology. Do you eat out? When, where, why, with whom? Describe the most important holidays and the role of food and commensality. How do you feel about eating and your body? Do you know anyone with fussy eating habits, eating disorders, or body image issues?

Do you know anyone suffering hunger, malnutrition, or food-related health problems? Describe healing with foods. Describe food during pregnancy and the postpartum period. Aversions? Cravings? Describe beliefs and practices of infant feeding. Describe outstanding food memories, good or bad. Describe symbolic foods and their meanings. Describe food uses in religion or ritual. Describe food uses in popular culture, literature, films, art, advertising, music, and so on.

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Categories of Analysis

After transcription, interview excerpts were sorted into the following categories. Antonito—place, people Body image Breast-feeding and pregnancy Cooking/not-cooking Diet, food, health, scarcity Ethnic relations Family Food production Funeral meals Gender and marriage Hunger Land, place, and water Language and education Local foods Meals Religion, holidays, and rituals Sharing, commensality, envidia, cuzco, greed Witchcraft Work/working/chores

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Population of Antonito, Conejos County, and Colorado, 1880–2000

Year

Population of Antonito, Colorado

Population of Conejos County, Colorado

Population of Colorado

1880

0

5,605

194,327

1890

315

7,193

412,198

1900

347

8,794

541,483

1910

681

11,285

799,044

1920

946

8,416

939,191

1930

858

9,803

1,035,791

1940

1,220

11,648

1,123,296

1950

1,255

10,171

1,325,089

1960

1,045

8,428

1,753,947

1970

1,113

7,846

2,209,596

1980

1,103

7,794

2,889,733

1990

875

7,453

3,294,394

2000

873

8,400

4,301,261

Population Growth, 1900–1950

Population Growth, 1950–2000

Antonito

362%

-70%

Conejos County

116%

-83%

Colorado

245%

325%

Source: http://dola.colorado.gov/demog/history/allhist.cfm. Accessed February 1, 2003.

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Wild Plants Used for Food or Healing in the Antonito Area

This information is garnered from interviews and is not medically authenticated or reliable. People should use caution with wild herbs as their potency varies, and they can often be mistaken for poisonous varieties. Plants follow a growth cycle and have different properties and potencies 1 at different times of the year. Amole—soap plant, soaproot. Root or underground bulb soaked in water that is used as a shampoo or soap for people and for wool blankets. Capulin/chokecherry bark. Made into tea. Ramona Valdez: “For heart trouble, such as palpitation.” Chamiso jediondo—stinky sagebrush (Dolan 1996, 60). Ramona Valdez: “A lot of people use it for all types of ailments.” Chamiso pardo—sagebrush (Dolan 1996, 60). Made into tea. Ramona Valdez: “For the flu, and for strain and for everything, toothaches, arthritis.” Champes—wild rose hips, from Rosa de Castilla (wild rose; Dolan 1996, 26). High in vitamin C; made into jelly. Ramona Valdez: “Father loved it, and he’d gather buckets and buckets.” Dandelion root—made into tea. Monica Taylor said her great-aunts made it for her, and it cured her leukemia. Imortal [English name unknown]. Ramona Valdez dried the root, scraped it, made an infusion in water, rubbed it on the chest, and drank it. Her mother believed it was a heart medicine. Malva—dwarf mallow or common mallow, “a weed.” Ramona Valdez: “The malvas was used to make a tea and make me dream, that was for my monthly. . . . When I had cramps, Mother said that would help.” (Not in Cobos 2003 or Dolan 1996.)

Manzanilla—chamomile. Asuncionita Mondragon said it was for stomachache. Manzanitas—berries. Cobos (2003, 145) translates manzanitas as “small apple, crab apple,” but several people, including Ramona Valdez, described them as small berries. “They may include the berry of the manzanita, a tall, evergreen shrub that produces berries that turn from white to reddish brown as they ripen in the fall” (Sayre 2001, 159). “Manzanitas” may be a generic term for several different kinds of berries that women made into jam. Maravilla, maravía—common marigold, wild four-o’clock (Cobos 2003, 146). Ramona dried the root, ground it to powder, and put it on her mother’s legs. It was supposed to reduce swelling. Oshá—lovage (Dolan 1996). “Wild celery, an herb of the Parsley family” (Cobos 2003, 123). The root can be dried and grated and infused in water to be used for toothache or to rinse the mouth to prevent infection after a tooth is pulled. It may also be used on boils, as an antibiotic, on skin problems or on cuts. Ramona Valdez: “They say it chases away the snakes when you go hiking, and they put some in your boots or somewhere in your pants. That’s what I’ve heard, I don’t know how true it is.” Helen Ruybal: “Whenever you had a cut, an accident, and you were afraid of infections, they bathed the sore with oshá. And other people put it away in their houses to keep the witches away, when they believed in witches.” Piñon—edible nut of the scrub pine tree (Cobos 2003, 182). Widely consumed in Antonito past and present. Plumajillo, plumajío—yarrow (Cobos 2003, 185; Dolan 1996, 43). Ramona Valdez gathered it for her mother to be used to cleanse the kidneys. Helen Ruybal: “People used to gather it in big bundles and take them home, and those have to be dried. I think it was for the kidneys. I think it was good for arthritis. It was for trouble from the inside, and then for not bewitching you. You just know that you hurt, and you know this remedy.” Poleo—spearmint. Ramona Valdez: “We use poleo to season. Sometimes we’d make lemonade and put some leaves of poleo in it. That was about it, I guess. We dried some to make tea. It’s very good for the stomach, too.” Quelites—lamb’s quarters. “A generic term that includes a variety of ‘greens’” (Cobos 2003, 191). Widely eaten fresh or dried. Verdolagas—purslane, pigweed (Cobos 2003, 237). Widely eaten fresh or dried. Ramona Valdez: “It’s a green, they grow in my yard. It

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has little round leaves, and they have branches. And we used to gather a lot of those and dry them for winter use, for Lent. They have a little bitter taste, like a tang, but they’re so good with beans. And most of the people would put chile, coarse chile, in the pan of the verdolagas to sauté them with onions and everything.” Yerbabuena—mint (Cobos 2003, 241). Ramona Valdez: “As a tea, for stomach trouble. Either bloating or discomfort, that’s mint, and then there’s another, spearmint, I guess.” Yerba de la negrita—bristly mallow (Cobos 2003, 241); globe mallow, cowboy’s delight (Dolan 1996, 16). Ramona Valdez: “It is very good for the hair. A lot of years ago that’s what the people used when their hair was thinning out, or after being sick and having a fever they’d use that, and it seems to [make hair] grow back. Or get stronger, the roots of the hair. It has like a little pinkish flower. It’s very low on the ground.”

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N O T E S

CHAPTER 1

1. See Rael 1940, 1942, 1957; see also the Library of Congress American Memory Web site on Juan B. Rael’s collection: http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/ rghtml/rghome.html. The Web site contains audio recordings of many songs, with transcriptions of the original Spanish along with English translations. Rael married Quirina Espinoza of Antonito, who was an ancestor of study participant Anna Garcia’s husband, Castelar Garcia. 2. I have done fieldwork in Bosa (Nuoro) on the island of Sardinia and in Lancaster, Pennsylvania (Counihan 1999), as well as in Florence, Italy (Counihan 2004) and Colorado’s San Luis Valley. 3. Some sources on Anglo-Hispanic conflict in the Southwest are Deutsch 1987; Gonzales 1999; Gonzales 2003; Larson 1975; Paredes 1958; Peña 1998a; Pulido 1996; Rosales 1997; Rosenbaum 1998; Taylor and Taggart 2003. 4. The American Anthropological Association Code of Ethics includes the following prescriptions: “Anthropological researchers must do everything in their power to ensure that their research does not harm the safety, dignity, or privacy of the people with whom they work. . . . Anthropological researchers must determine in advance whether their hosts/providers of information wish to remain anonymous or receive recognition, and make every effort to comply with those wishes. . . . Anthropological researchers should obtain in advance the informed consent of persons being studied. . . . It is understood that the informed consent process is dynamic and continuous; the process should be initiated in the project design and continue through implementation by way of dialogue and negotiation with those studied. . . . Anthropologists . . . should recognize their debt to the societies in which they work and their obligation to reciprocate with people studied in appropriate ways.” See www.aaanet.org/committees/ethics/ ethcode.htm. Accessed January 25, 2006. 5. See Behar and Gordon 1995; Gluck and Patai 1991; Wolf 1992. 6. Testimonios emerged as a literary genre out of the liberation struggles of indigenous people, workers, and campesinos in Latin America in the 1960s and

1970s and are widely known through the book I Rigoberta Menchú (Menchú and Burgos-Debray 1987). Beverly (1993, 70–71) defines testimonios as “told in the first person by a narrator who is also the real protagonist or witness of the events she or he recounts. . . . The production of a testimonio often involves the tape recording and then the transcription and editing of an oral account by an interlocutor who is an intellectual, journalist, or writer.” The Latina Feminist Group (2001, 2) defines testimonios as “a crucial means of bearing witness and inscribing into history those lived realities that would otherwise succumb to the alchemy of erasure.” 7. My work aspires to what the Latina Feminist Group (2001) calls “telling to live.” Like Benmayor, Torruellas, and Juarbe (1997, 153) I use women’s stories to “paint the landscape of collective memory.” I believe that building knowledge is a collaborative project between the researcher and the study participants. My approach is similar to what Abarca (2006, 9) calls theorizing “from the ground up” in her study of the charlas culinarias (culinary chats) she had with working-class women. In my interviews, diverse women in Antonito revealed what the Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci (1955, 3) described as “common sense, . . . the philosophy of the non-philosophers,” which contains an “established conception of the world.” See Nelson 1980, which provides a collection of what she called testamentos from Hispanic women folk artists of the San Luis Valley, Colorado. 8. Jim Taggart worked with José Inez (Joe) Taylor, a self-described Chicano, storyteller, writer, and worker, to produce Alex and the Hobo: A Chicano Life and Story. It begins with Taylor’s semiautobiographical novella and follows with an exegesis of its key themes based on a long-term interview dialogue between Taylor and Taggart. Taylor emerges as an organic intellectual who has developed a critical class analysis of his culture. 9. Student assistants Justin Garcia, Kari John, Megan Kirkpatrick, Lauren Schaller, and Maegan Crandall helped with the transcriptions, and I thank them all. 10. On power in the ethnographic process, see Appadurai 1988; Behar and Gordon 1995; Wolf 1992. Appadurai (1988) asked, “How can we construct our voices so they represent the diversity of voices we hear in the field? How can we construct in anthropology a dialogue that captures the encounter of our own many voices with the diversity of voices we hear and purport to represent? The problem of voice (“speaking for” and “speaking to”) intersects with the problem of place (speaking “from” and speaking “of”)” (17). He continues, “The problem of place and voice is ultimately a problem of power. . . . [T]here is the power involved in representing the voices of others (“speaking for”), since ethnography is by its nature both description and representation” (20). 11. See also Limón 1998. 12. On the history of Mexicanos in the San Luis Valley, see Aguilar 2002; Deutsch 1987; Stoller 1982; Swadesh 1974. 13. On the history, culture, foodways, and land use of the San Luis Valley and siete condados, see Aguilar 2002; Bean 1975; Campa 1979; Counihan 2002, 2005,

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2006a, 2006b, 2007; Deutsch 1987; García 1998; Gutierrez and Eckert 1991; Marsh 1991; Martínez 1987; Osburn 1998; Peña 1998; Simmons 1979, 2001; Taggart 2002, 2003; Taylor and Taggart 2003; Tushar 1992; Valdez and Pong 2005; Weber 1991; Young 1997. See also Aaron Abeyta’s (2001, 2005, 2007) beautiful prose and poetry grounded in the culture and landscape of Antonito. 14. On Mormon settlement in the southern San Luis Valley, see Stoller 1982, xxiv; Swadesh 1974, 79–80. 15. Martínez (1998, 70) describes the siete condados del norte and their percentage of Hispanics: “These counties are Costilla (75.9%) and Conejos (59.8%) in Colorado and Taos (64.9%), Río Arriba (72.7%), San Miguel (79.6%), Mora (85.0%), and Guadalupe (84.3%)” in New Mexico. 16. On mercantile trade in the San Luis Valley, see Deutsch 1987, 13; Weigle 1975. 17. Perlite is “a generic term for naturally occurring silicous rock.” When heated, perlite expands from “four to twenty times its original volume” and is used as filler in construction, horticulture and industry. See www.perlite.org/ perlite_info/guides/general_info/basic_facts.pdf (accessed January 3, 2008). See also the perlite industry’s Web site, www.perlite.org; and the U.S. Geological Service Web site, http://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/commodity/perlite. New Mexico is the largest producer of perlite in the United States. Antonito residents work at perlite mines in northern New Mexico, but production has been dropping steadily over the past two decades and in 2006 reached its lowest levels since 1984. See http://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/commodity/perlite/perlimcs07. pdf. Accessed January 3, 2008. 18. The population in the 2000 census was 7,960 and was estimated to have grown approximately 9 percent, to 8,679, by July 2006. See www.city-data.com/ city/Alamosa-Colorado.html. Accessed April 14, 2008. 19. For more information about the Cumbres & Toltec Scenic Railroad, see www.cumbrestoltec.com/. 20. Throughout this book, the ages I give for participants are as of 2000, whether or not that was the year I interviewed them. 21. Owens 2006. CHAPTER 2

1. Outlawing Spanish was not only a blow to the culture. As Teddy noted, “This has created many learning problems for our children, which as a teacher I struggled much to help them overcome.” 2. Taos, New Mexico, is sixty miles from Antonito, and many Antonitans have ties of kinship and culture to Taos. Now famous for being an artists’ colony and a retirement community for outsiders, Taos has deep Hispanic and Indian roots, and Taos Pueblo still thrives today. 3. See Deutsch 1987, Chap. 3, on female Presbyterian missionaries in the Upper Rio Grande.

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4. People in Antonito rarely used the term “Hispano,” which is sometimes used in the northern New Mexico villages from which their ancestors migrated. See Elsasser, MacKenzie, and Tixier y Vigil 1980; Madrid 1998. 5. Swadesh (1974, 206) also used the term “indo-hispano” which she defined as “the Spanish-speaking person rooted in his mountain village and sharing much ancestry and historic experience with Indian neighbors.” 6. Swadesh (1973, 206) suggested that Hispanics began to call themselves Spanish or Spanish-American in the first decades of the twentieth century to distinguish themselves from Mexicans who were brought to the United States to break strikes by the Western Federation of Miners. When Teddy Madrid read this, however, she disagreed and wrote, “We always knew our roots. Ignorant of our history we are not!” 7. Helen Ruybal concurred with Ramona: “’Gringo’ is a nasty word, well, not a nasty word, but something like that. I wouldn’t call a friend of mine ‘gringo.’” 8. See Jaramillo’s ([1955] 2000) and Cabeza de Baca’s ([1954] 1994) memoirs for a picture of upper-class Hispanic environments in northern New Mexico and Martin’s (1992, 2004) books for voices of Arizona Hispanic women of diverse class and occupation. 9. On the Chicano movement, see Rosales 1996; and on the Raza Unida party, see García 1989.

CHAPTER 3

1. According to Peña (2005), tierra y vida (land and life) is a widely heard saying among southern Colorado Mexicanos. 2. Stoller (1982, xvii) wrote that the southern San Luis Valley “is linked as a physiographic unit with northern New Mexico, the Tewa basin, and the Santa Fe area,” also known as the Rio Arriba region. On northern New Mexico Hispanic villages, see Briggs 1988; Campa 1979; Kutsche and Van Ness 1981; Peña 1998a; Swadesh 1974; Weigle 1975. 3. Deutsch (1987, 17) wrote, “In the 1840s and 1850s, . . . families from Abiquiu in Rio Arriba County [NM] settled Guadalupe in southern Colorado, families from El Rito [NM] settled Rincones [CO], and Taos [NM] families settled San Luis [CO].” 4. The source for the Conejos Land Grant is the Colorado State Archives: www.colorado.gov/dpa/doit/archives/mlg/mlg.html#conejos. Accessed August 31, 2005. 5. Land grant settlers used forests but mostly at lower elevations and with minor ecological effects because they lacked roads, industrial technology for large-scale cutting, and markets for timber (Peña and Martínez 1998, 160–161). Deforestation was not a large problem before the establishment of national forests in 1891 and huge private estates in the second half of the twentieth century such as Malcolm Forbes’s development northeast of Antonito and the Taylor Ranch in

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the Sangre de Cristo Mountains (Hicks and Peña 2003; Peña and Martínez 1998; Peña and Mondragon-Valdéz 1998). National forests subsidized road building and allowed so much logging that “old-growth ecosystems have been thoroughly devastated” (Peña and Martínez 1998, 161–162). Forbes subdivided more than half of his 240,000 acres and built almost 480 miles of roads for homes and loggers. In 1960 Jack Taylor, a descendant of President Zachary Taylor, purchased a 77,000-acre tract near San Luis of what had long been communal land under an 1863 deed of Charles Beaubien. Taylor Ranch “sold deeds for logging cuts of 80 to 100 million board feet,” which increased soil erosion, speeded snow melt, shortened the irrigation season, and harmed the land, farmers, and ranchers (Peña and Martínez 1998, 163). Local and outside activists mounted a legal battle to protest the logging and enclosure of previously communal land. In July 2004 the courts returned use rights on this land to nine land grant heirs, in April 2005 to over one hundred more, and in July 2005 to four hundred more (Associated Press 2005; Calloway 2004; Ortiz 2005). 6. Hispanics in New Mexico, Arizona, and Colorado won only 2 million of the 35 million contested acres in the public domain. The rest went to “railroads, Anglo homesteaders and national forests” (Deutsch 1987, 20). After 1848 Mexicanos lost land previously free of taxes to new U.S. taxes. To establish landownership, Mexicanos had to adapt to Anglo law, and they had to pay for surveying and legal procedures to establish land claims. Anglos dominated the legal system and won most of the court cases. Even when Hispanics won in the courts, they often lost their land to lawyers in payment for legal fees (Swadesh 1974, 68). Thousands of acres in northern New Mexico and southern Colorado were taken for national forests: the Santa Fe in 1892, the Cibola and Carson in 1906, and the Rio Grande in 1908 (Swadesh 1974, 70, 130–131). With the loss of common lands for pasture, Hispanic sheepherders incurred debts for land rent, and in the depressions of the 1890s and 1907, many lost herds and became partidarios—sheep sharecroppers (Deutsch 1987, 22; Weigle 1975, 213–222). After the Civil War, with the growth of railroads, Anglo competition for land increased dramatically. 7. Few Hispanics homesteaded, because of fees ($14 for a 160-acre tract) and because they thought the land they lived on was already theirs (Martínez 1987). 8. On the impact of capitalist development on southern San Luis Valley ecology, see Deutsch 1987; García 1988, 1998; Hicks and Peña 2003; Martínez 1987, 1998; Peña 1998a, 1998b, 1998c, 1998d; Peña and Martínez 1998; Peña and Mondragon-Valdéz 1998; Pulido 1996, 1998. 9. While Anna was talking about Braiden, her husband, Castelar, pulled out a much-folded, dried-out article from La Jara Chronicle, dated November 2, 2006, with the headline, “W. A. Braiden—The Miserable Liar, Perjurer, and Crook.” It described Braiden’s underhanded political dealings and accusations that he had embezzled money while working in the county offices but not his land acquisitions.

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10. The Gorras Blancas (White Caps) of San Miguel County, New Mexico, was a secret organization of fifteen hundred members that cut fences, tore up railroads, and burned bridges (Deutsch 1987, 25; Larson 1975; Rosenbaum 1998, 111–124). The People’s Party formed in 1890, the Manos Negras (Black Hands) roamed from the 1890s until the 1920s “cutting fences and burning barns,” and the Penitentes became more political (Deutsch 1987, 26; Rosenbaum 1998). 11. The SPMDTU expanded to eight branches between 1885 and 1912 and still exists today (Sanchez 1971). It holds regular monthly meetings in Antonito and annual meetings of all the New Mexico and Colorado branches. 12. On Tijerina and the Tierra Amarilla Land Grant struggles, see Gonzales 2003, 314–317; Peña 2005, 102; Rosales 1997, 154–170; Swadesh 1974, 130– 131. 13. “The BLM manages 8.4 million acres of public lands in Colorado—ranging from 4,000 to over 14,000 feet in elevation—along with 29 million acres of subsurface mineral estate. . . . The agency manages these lands for a multitude of uses, including recreation, mining, wildlife habitat, wilderness, energy development, and livestock grazing.” www.blm.gov/co/st/en/BLM_Information/ about_blm.2.html. Accessed January 4, 2008. “Management of rangeland occurs on approximately 8.3 million acres of public land administered by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) in Colorado. . . . Rangeland also provides forage and habitat to domestic livestock. In Colorado, nearly 1500 livestock operators are authorized grazing use on 2500 grazing areas called allotments through an approved grazing permit/lease. Grazing is managed by the terms and conditions specified for each allotment on the permit/lease, e.g., kind and number of livestock, season of use, and amount of use permitted each grazing year. Permit/leases are generally issued for a term of 10 years. When permits/leases expire, before being renewed they undergo a review for conformance with land use plans and compliance with environmental documentation requirements.” www.blm.gov/co/st/en/BLM_Programs/grazing.1.html. Accessed January 4, 2008. 14. When Helen Ruybal said that her father-in-law wanted to sell his BLM land, I believe that she meant he wanted to sell the lease rights. 15. Los Sauces is a tiny community where the Conejos River and the Rio Grande meet. Two former residents, Olivama Salazar de Valdez and Dolores Valdez de Pong, wrote Life in Los Sauces (2005). 16. On the Rio Grande National Forest, see www.fs.fed.us/r2/riogrande/ about/. 17. For camping information, regulations, and fees at Aspen Glade in the RGNF, see www.fs.fed.us/r2/riogrande/recreation/camping/cg_con_aspen_glade. shtml and www.reserveusa.com/jsp/commonpage.jsp?goto=/nrrs/co/asgl/newparkfees.html. 18. Data on rainfall in Manassa are taken from www.wrcc.dri.edu:80/cgi-bin/ cliMAIN.pl?comana. Accessed June 26, 2007.

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19. On acequias, see Crawford 1988; Gallegos 1998; Hicks and Peña 2003; Luján 1999; Peña 1998a; Rivera 1998; Weber 1991. 20. Rivera describes New Mexico acequias: “These irrigation works included an earthen presa (dam) and inlet works, the acequia madre (mother ditch or main canal), compuertas (headgates), canoas (log flumes for arroyo crossings), sangrías (lateral ditches cut perpendicular from the main canal to irrigate individual parcels of land), and a desagüe channel, which drains surplus water back to the stream source” (1998, 3). Peña elaborates: “The lateral ditches deliver water from the mother ditch to individual riparian long-lots. The sangria (bleeding) ditches are used to distribute water evenly within the farming and gardening plots, and the espinazo (spinal) ditches are used to deliver water to the middle of the fields” (1998d, 276 n. 15). 21. Hicks and Peña 2003; Crawford 1988; and Gallegos 1998 give examples of both the cooperation and the conflict present in acequia management. 22. One study estimated that to grow potatoes, barley, and alfalfa, acequia flood irrigation uses about 40 percent more water than center-pivot irrigation but returns all the excess water to the aquifer, resulting in identical water consumption (SLVDRG 2002, F-14). Further studies are needed to assess the amount of sprinkler water lost to evaporation on hot windy summer days. 23. Peña (1998d, 263–266) gives an example of how acequias reinforce a diverse ecosystem on the Corpus Aquino Gallegos Ranch in San Luis, which grows eight varieties of heirloom corn, two kinds of bolita beans, one of habas (horse beans), and several kinds of apple, plum, pears, apricots, chokecherries and “the unique cirhuelita del indio (wild miniature black plum)” (266). 24. On recent efforts to sell San Luis Valley water out of the valley, see Fish 2000; Lloyd 1998. 25. The Rio Grande River Compact of 1938 allocated huge quantities of the water of the Rio Grande and its tributaries downstream to New Mexico, Texas, and Mexico (see Hill 1974; http://wrri.nmsu.edu/wrdis/compacts/Rio-GrandeCompact.pdf). On water resources in the San Luis Valley, see Emery 1971. On the San Luis Valley Water Project and the authorization, construction, and use of the Platoro Dam on the upper Conejos River, see www.usbr.gov/dataweb/html/ sanluis.html; and Simonds (n.d.) at www.usbr.gov/history/sanluisv.html. On the current controversy over the rights of ditch owners vs. well users vs. Colorado’s water obligations to downriver states and Mexico, see Hildner 2007. 26. A section of land is 160 acres. 27. See Hildner 2007 on Conejos County surface water users who claim that their senior water rights are being violated by groundwater users pumping well water for irrigation and depleting the overall water supplies. 28. The San Luis Valley Project involved construction of the Platoro Dam and Reservoir to store the Conejos River water for irrigation and to help meet Colorado’s water obligations to New Mexico and Texas, established by the 1938 Rio Grande Compact, and to Mexico, established by the Treaty of 1909. Con-

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struction began on the Platoro Dam in 1948 and ended in 1951, employing an average of 120 workers, including Teddy Madrid’s father, at pay rates from $1.30 to $2.50 per hour (Simonds [n.d.] www.usbr.gov/history/sanluisv.html). Simonds (n.d., 9) concluded, “The addition of the Platoro Dam did not significantly alter the quality of life in the valley, nor did it affect the population growth of the area. The anticipated benefit to the growers of the valley has not been realized due to the requirements of the Rio Grande Compact.” (See also www.usbr.gov/ dataweb/html/sanluis.html.) 29. The Front Range refers to the populous eastern side of the Rocky Mountains where Colorado’s biggest cities—Fort Collins, Greeley, Denver, Colorado Springs, and Pueblo—are located. 30. Ida Luján (1999) from Rio Arriba County, New Mexico, just across the mountains from Antonito, described in painful detail the gender discrimination and sexual harassment she encountered after her father died and she and her mother tried to defend her family’s water shares and role in the ditch association. She spoke of tape-recording ditch meetings to protect her interests and getting “rageful responses” and “threats of physical harm” (102). After years of perseverance and a law degree, she became the first female chair of the acequia commission in her town, perhaps a harbinger of women’s increasing role in acequia management in Colorado and New Mexico. 31. In Los Ojos, New Mexico, forty Mexicano families benefit from a sheepherding cooperative begun in the early 1980s that raises the traditional churro sheep and has a weaving business, retail store, and several community projects (www.handweavers.com). After years of struggle, Ganados del Valle achieved “ecological legitimacy” and access to sufficient land for their sheep. Pulido (1998, 138) says their success is a “rare example of social and environmental justice, which in turn is creating a new Hispano culture.” CHAPTER 4

1. For data on rainfall, see the Western Climate Center’s Web site: www.wrcc. dri.edu:80/cgi-bin/cliMAIN.pl?comana. 2. In northern New Mexico Hispanic culture, Martínez (1998, 74) writes, attitudes toward food, like those toward water, were replete with “admonitions against waste.” 3. On northern New Mexico Hispanic foodways, see Cabeza de Baca [1949] 1982, [1954] 1994; Cabeza de Baca Gilbert [1942] 1970; Jaramillo [1939] 1981, [1955] 2000; Swadesh 1974. Weigle (1975) describes the local economies of the Tewa Basin villages in 1935, including El Rito and Abiquiu from which many settlers migrated to Colorado. In El Rito families had orchards and gardens where they tried “to raise enough vegetables to last through the year. Cabbage, turnips, radishes, carrots, sweet corn, peas, mustard, and all varieties of melons are raised. Very few of the homes have root cellars; but all of the families do some canning and drying of fruits and vegetables” (Weigle 1975, 150).

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4. For information on southern Colorado Hispanic foodways, see Deutsch 1987; Peña 1998a. Deutsch found that in the period 1880–1940 women’s work centered on food: “The effort and time involved in processing, the vagaries of the harvest, and the love of the land which had produced it for generations, as well as its life-giving properties, imbued food at times with a symbolic significance” and contributed to women’s importance (1987, 52). 5. Ramona Valdez remembered raising pigs called bragaos that were black with a white stripe around the belly. 6. A shoat is a young pig that has been weaned from its mother. 7. I asked Ramona Valdez if she used lard as medicine, and she remembered her sister making hand lotion by mixing lard with rosewater and other things. She remembered a woman who worked for her family complaining about her badly cracked heels. Ramona’s mother told her to use hard lard (tallow from sheep or cattle) to soften them. 8. One of the Arizona Mexicanas interviewed by Martin (1992, 154) reported the same method. 9. Curiously, no one I interviewed dried or aged cheese. 10. Cobos (1983, 161–162) defines tasol/tazol as “bean hulls and other refuse left after thrashing [sic]: straw.” 11. Swadesh reports that chaqueue was given to women during the forty-day postpartum period called dieta, which involved seclusion in the home, bedrest, no sex, and special food. They were “fed a rich diet of chaqueue (the Tewa term for blue corn atole), to which was soon added diced, boiled lamb, or the flesh of a male black goat” (1974, 152). 12. Helen Ruybal described the itinerant merchants from New Mexico: We called them Chameros, but they didn’t like to be called Chameros. They’d stop by each house. They had chili, and they had pozole and peas, the yellow peas. They had apples and apricots, whatever they raised. They would go from house to house, and some people were just eager to get these good things like chili and fruit. In the little towns they didn’t have fruits. Some people would buy just chili, and another would buy the black-eyed peas, and some people beans, real beans, pintos. They had white beans that we don’t see anymore—they’re really good—and alberjón, like peas, and they usually didn’t grow them in the little towns around here. They bought them when these wagons came along. Then they started coming in trucks, but that was very recently. They still come like that now. If you buy something, let’s say, chili, then the next time they come around they’ll be sure to stop at your house because you were treating them nice with the profits. The Indians in Bernalillo would come, and they would bring strings of chile—fresh-looking and tied up in strings. The people would look for them because they had chili and took whatever you gave for them. All they wanted was bales of hay, and they would take them for their stock. They spoke English, and they said, “We just want more hay, and then you can have more chili and fruit.” I think it was apples or peaches. So we always had enough chili, for us and

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for giving away to Carlos’s relatives. This chile, we’d hang it outside to get dry, and then we’d just grind it with a blender sometimes and then make chili caribe out of it. Then we had this sauce on the table, or we made a meat dish with it, like a gravy, so we really appreciated chili and we always had a lot of it, and we never bought it except with hay.

13. In Laura Esquivel’s novel Like Water for Chocolate (1989), Tita repeats several times, “The secret ingredient is love.” 14. The high meat consumption of Antonito is also typical of norteño Mexican cuisine (Pilcher 2004). 15. “On halves” means splitting fifty-fifty between the person who owned the slaughtered animal and the person who processed it. 16. On Colorado hunting regulations, see http://wildlife.state.co.us/Hunting/; on fishing, see http://wildlife.state.co.us/Fishing/. 17. Cobos (1983) defines calabacitas as “squash, zucchini” but also as “dim. of calabaza,” which he translates as “pumpkin.” 18. For information on piñon, see www.pfaf.org/database/plants. php?Pinus+edulis. Accessed June 27, 2007. 19. I was unable to find a translation for imortal. CHAPTER 5

1. See Engels 1972; Lamphere 2000; Leacock 1972; Moore 1988; Rosaldo 1974; Sacks 1974; Sargent 1981. 2. On the relationship between women’s work and their status in Chicana/o households, see Coltrane and Valdez 1997; Pesquera 1993, 2000; Ruiz 2000a, 2000b; Segura 2000; Ybarra 1982. 3. The Church of Latter-day Saints encourages its members to maintain a three-month and long-term extra food supply, and Mormons have been leaders in canning and shared their knowledge with others. See www.providentliving. org/channel/1,11677,1706-1,00.html. Accessed May 8, 2008. CHAPTER 6

1. For examples of how women express agency through cooking, see Inness’s (2001b) collection. 2. Gramsci’s (1955, 27) original: “Che cosa è l’uomo? Se ci pensiamo, vediamo che ponendoci la domanda che cosa è l’uomo, vogliamo dire: che cosa l’uomo può diventare, se cioè l’uomo può dominare il proprio destino, può ‘farsi’, può crearsi una vita. Diciamo dunque che l’uomo è un processo e precisamente è il processo dei suoi atti.” (“In posing the question: what is a human being, we mean what can human beings become, whether, that is, humans can dominate their own destiny, can ‘make themselves,’ can create a life. Let us say then that

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human beings are a process, and precisely the process of their actions”; my translation.) 3. On U.S. Mexicanas and cooking, see Abarca 2001, 2004, 2006; Blend 2001a, 2001b; Coltrane and Valdez 1997; Counihan 2002a, 2005, 2006a; Pesquera 1993; Williams 1985; Ybarra 1982; Zavella 1987. 4. On the cooking of the Hispanic women of northern New Mexico whose communities provided some of the migrants who settled Antonito, see Cabeza de Baca Gilbert [1942] 1970, [1949] 1982, [1954] 1994; Jaramillo [1939] 1981, [1955] 2000. Other sources on Mexican American foodways, in addition to those in note 3 above, are Bentley 1998; Montaño 1992, 1997. 5. I published another version of the following story from a different interview in Counihan 2006a, 2007. 6. Janice elaborated: “A dump cake is when you put all the ingredients together in the cake, and you don’t mix it. You just put layers of stuff; then when you cook it, it comes out good, like a pudding cake.” 7. Monica Taylor remembered an important emotional link to her father’s family after her mother died and she was raised by her maternal grandparents: “Grandpa Taylor, what little bit of time I got to spend with him, he always made Taylor potatoes. Maybe Dad’s told you that story? He would cut them in slices and leave the peeling on and throw some onions in. Dad hates onion. I love onion. That is how he fried his potatoes. We’ve always called them, even my own grandmother Marquez would call them, Taylor potatoes because Grandpa Taylor made them that way.” 8. Biscochitos are the traditional festive cookies baked for Christmas and other occasions whose ingredients include flour, lard, sugar, and anise. The Hispanic women of Arizona interviewed by Martin (1992) call them biscochuelos. 9. On women writing about cooking, see Abu-Jaber 2004, 2006; Avakian 1997; Colwin 2000; Fisher 1954; Randall 1997; Reichl 1999. 10. Some works on women’s fraught relationship with cooking are Abarca 2004, 2006; Blend 2001a, 2001b; Charles and Kerr 1988; Counihan 1999, 2004; DeVault 1991; Ellis 1983; Hauck-Lawson 1992, 1998; Inness 2001a. CHAPTER 7

1. On family meals, see Bossard 1943; Bove and Sobal 2006; Brembeck 2005; Carrington 1999; Charles and Kerr 1988; Counihan 2004; DeVault 1991; Douglas 1975; Roth 2005; Sobal and Nelson 2003; Stockmeyer 2001; Williams 1985; Wood 1995. On negative correlations with declining family meals, see the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University report, The Importance of Family Dinners (2003); Hofferth and Sandburg 2001; Mitchell 2004; Pretty 2004; Sobal and Nelson 2003; Stockmeyer 2001; Videon and Manning 2003. One study found that just over half of Americans reported eating a family meal “most days” and that (compared to an admittedly tiny

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sample from nine European countries) the United States has the highest percentage (46 percent) of people who eat a meal alone “every day or most days” and Italy the lowest (25 percent) (Yin 2003). 2. On Mexicano families across the United States, see De Anda 2004a, 2004b; Rochín and de la Torre 1996; Saenz, Morales, and Filoteo 2004. 3. Across cultures feeding is a widely used practice to mark adoption or incorporation of family members. Young (1971, 41) points out that the Old English word foster means “food” (see also Counihan 1999, 17). 4. On the relationship of Chicanas’ earning power and work demands to the sharing of household labor with their husbands, see Pesquera 1993; Ybarra 1982. On gender and food preparation in Mexicano communities, see also Abarca 2006; Blend 2001a, 2001b; Coltrane and Valdez 1997; Williams 1985. 5. On men cooking in Antonito, see Taggart 2002, 2003; Taylor and Taggart 2003. On men cooking in all male groups, see Deutsch 2005; Mechling 2005; Wilk 2006; Wilk and Hintlian 2005. 6. On food and domestic conflict, see Counihan 2002b, 2005; DeVault 1991; Ellis 1983. 7. Her story illustrated Riddiough’s (1981, 80) assertion, “The family teaches us our first lessons in ruling class ideology.” 8. On Presbyterian missions in northern New Mexico and southern Colorado, see Deutsch 1987, 63–86. 9. For an Antonito man’s somewhat different concept of respect, see Taylor and Taggart 2003, 117; and on a Chicana activist’s definition, see Rosaldo and Flores 1997, 69. CHAPTER 8

1. Sahlins (1972, 169) wrote, “The gift is alliance, solidarity, communion—in brief, peace”; it is the “primitive analogue of the social contract.” See Kahn 1986; Mauss 1967; Young 1971. 2. See Taylor and Taggart (2003, 91) on envy and its effects in Antonito. 3. Cobos (2003, 41) described a New Mexico and southern Colorado finger game to illustrate the meaning of cuzco: Este se jalló un huevito, éste lo echó a freír, éste lo meneó, éste lo echó sal y este viejo cuzco se lo comió.

This one [of the fingers] found a small egg, This one put it to fry, This one scrambled it, This one put salt on it, And this old stingy one Ate it all up.

4. Helen was referring to the project Carmen organized when she was the mayor to improve the sidewalks on Antonito’s Main Street.

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5. This conflict is at the heart of Taylor and Taggart’s Alex and the Hobo (2003) and of Taylor’s contrast between granjeador and cuzco. 6. On witchcraft in the Hispanic Southwest, see Simmons 1974; and Anaya’s novel Bless Me, Última (1994). 7. While some brujas were said to be moneylenders, Trujillo (1983, 57) reported that “estar bruja” means “to be broke, out of funds.” 8. I found myself holding similar wary beliefs about witches after I ate some lamb associated with a known witch and then was wracked by a week of agonizing pain when a decade-old root canal suddenly gave way, ultimately resulting in a tooth extraction (Counihan 2003). 9. Witches have long been known to pass their magic through food. In court records from the Mexican Inquisition, Behar (1989, 178) found evidence dating back to 1774 of women’s “use of food magic” to ensorcel husbands to prevent abuse. See also Pilcher 1998, 59. Another way in which witches ensorcelled others was through touch. I asked Helen if she had heard of witches using fingernail clippings or hair for ensorcelment. She replied: I still believe that, not too hard. But when I comb my hair, there’s a lot of hair sometimes, but I clean the brush, and I burn the hair. I don’t really believe, but I believe. I mean, I’ve heard about it. I know that has happened in the past. If they take a piece of your hair, they can work bewitching it—I don’t know how, make all your hair come off or make you lose your mind. Usually it works on your mind, and your body.

Helen said that her best friend’s hands became arthritic after a handshake with a witch and that after trying many doctors she cured it with oshá. She described her friend’s experience in detail: My friend thought she was bewitched, on one wrist. One hand was always hurting. She’d go to the doctors, and nothing, maybe just arthritis or something like that. And she died with a stiff wrist. She said she noticed it one time [when] they were celebrating, when you get together and shake hands, and that night she felt like something was happening, and every day more, and every day more, until it got to hurt badly. It was always hurting, every minute of the day. She knew who had shaken hands with her at that time when she started feeling funny. Oh, I guess witches were after her because she also had eczema on the other hand. She was cured of those things with oshá. They used to make a paste out of it and put it on and wrap it. It took years before she got well, and she said she was bewitched because she remembered the old lady who had been so friendly to her who was not [friendly] before.

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When I asked Helen why they bewitched her friend, she replied, “They would envy her for her attitude. She was very active, and she was friendly, and she was sturdy; she was one of those people who stuck up for herself. If you did something to her, she would fight it out. Even any little move, you know. She wouldn’t let anything go by.” 10. The same advice—to drink only from a can they themselves open—is given to women today to avoid ingesting the so-called date rape drug, which may be slipped into an open drink at a party. 11. All names in this story are pseudonyms. CHAPTER 9

1. This quotation from Bakhtin (1984, 283) is cited in Thursby (2006, 3). 2. In his classic Rites of Passage (1960), Van Gennep devotes Chapter 8 to funerals. 3. I was unable to determine exactly when people stopped holding wakes at home. All the Mexicanos I knew in Antonito used the Romero Funeral Home. The Romero family opened a mortuary business in Alamosa in 1977 that grew to have sites in Antonito, San Luis, Monte Vista, and La Jara. The Romeros also have funeral homes outside the valley, in Denver, Walsenberg, Pueblo, and La Junta (www.romerofuneralhome.com/Links/003%20Our%20History.htm; accessed September 10, 2007). I was unable to find information about valley funeral homes that might have preceded the Romeros’. The Rogers Family Mortuary surrendered its license and closed in 1998 as a result of a class action settlement about improper treatment of remains (www.hilsoft.com/rogers/qa.pdf; accessed September 10, 2007). 4. On the Penitentes, see Taylor and Taggart 2003, 81; Weigle 1976; Rael 1942. Rael provides a detailed description of the Penitentes’ role in La Percíngula ritual in honor of St. Francis, held on the eve of August 2 in Arroyo Hondo, New Mexico. 5. Weigle (1976, 175–176) reports on the northern New Mexico rituals of death: In Hispanic Catholic tradition, a velorio de difuntos (“wake for the dead”) followed. The corpse was washed, dressed, and laid out in the largest room of the house, surrounded by lighted candles. It was never alone until burial. Sympathetic neighbors arrived and went first to pray over the body and then to another room where los dolientes (“the mourners”) waited to receive pésames (“condolences”). Throughout the night, alabados [hymns] were sung and prayers recited, with a rosary service around midnight. Outside, small bonfires were lit, and the men gathered around them to talk and joke while the women prepared la cena, the supper that was to be served shortly after midnight. These were warm and friendly occasions. . . . Praying and singing continued until dawn, when an appropriate, final alabado was sung.

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6. This is a pseudonym. 7. Bernadette Vigil commented that at an Anglo friend’s funeral they had been served tea sandwiches rather than a full-course meal (Counihan 2005, 207–208). 8. In their use of feasting to create solidarity, Mexicanos are like the New Zealand Maori, one of whom said, “Our feasts are the movement of the needle which sews together the parts of our reed roofs, making of them a single roof, one single word” (Mauss 1967, 19). C H A P T E R 10

1. These figures come from the Web site www.fedstats.gov/qf/states/08/08021. html. Accessed December 20, 2007. 2. The average price of a Food Stamp meal was $1.19 in 2007. This amount has declined since the “welfare reform” of 1996, when the standard deduction for applicants was frozen at $134, ignoring the rising cost of living (Colorado Fiscal Policy Institute 2007). 3. The McCurdy School is a boarding school founded in 1912 and affiliated with the United Methodist Church in Española, New Mexico, about ninety miles from Antonito, which defines its mission as “providing a quality education with a Christian emphasis” (www.mccurdy.org/; accessed December 15, 2007). 4. In the South Conejos School District, school meets Monday through Thursday, 7:30 A.M. until 4:00 P.M., with no school on Fridays. 5. Nord, Andrews, and Carlson (2006) report that Food Stamps, the National School Lunch Program, and the WIC Program are the three largest food assistance programs. In 2005 Food Stamps provided benefits to 25.7 million people, costing over $28 billion, with an average benefit per person of $93 a month. In 2005 the National School Lunch Program operated in about 100,000 schools and served an average of over 29 million meals per day, more than 60 percent of which were free or reduced price. In 2005 the WIC Program served an average of 8 million people per month, with an average monthly benefit of $38 per person. In 2005 the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Emergency Food Assistance Program supplied 476 million pounds of commodity food to soup kitchens and food pantries. Also: “Some 4 million households (3.5 percent of all households) obtained emergency food from food pantries one or more times during the 12-month period ending in December 2005” (Nord, Andrews, and Carlson 2006, 32). 6. Deutsch 1987, 53. See also Cabeza de Baca Gilbert [1942] 1970, [1949] 1982, [1954] 1994; Jaramillo [1939] 1981, [1955] 2000; Swadesh 1974. 7. On Chicanas’ activism linking the personal and the political, see also Davis 1998.

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1. Stevens 2005 estimates that there are 60 million barbecues on the Fourth of July each year in the United States. 2. In the 2002 agricultural census, there were 494 farms in Conejos County, with an average size of 542 acres and average gross sales per farm of $46,259, down 18 percent from 1997. Data on agriculture come from NASS, fact finders for agriculture, USDA, based on the 2002 Census of Agriculture, County Profile, Conejos, Colorado: www.nass.usda.gov/census/census02/profiles/co/cp08021. pdf; accessed February 22, 2008. 3. Data are from Economic Development Intelligence Systems (EDIS), taken from the U.S. Census: https://edis.commerce.state.nc.us/sasdav/countyProfile/ CO/08021.pdf; accessed February 22, 2008. 4. On Italian American cuisine, see Diner 2001; Levenstein 1985. 5. On the San Luis Valley diabetes study, see Hamman et al. 1989: “The age-adjusted prevalence of confirmed non-insulin-dependent diabetes mellitus was 21/1,000 in Anglo males and 44/1,000 in Hispanic males, accounting for non-response. For Anglo females, the prevalence was 13/1,000 compared with 62/1,000 for Hispanic females, accounting for nonresponse” (Abstract). See also Marshall, Hamman, and Baxter (1991) whose San Luis Valley diabetes study concluded that “non-insulin dependent diabetes mellitus is triggered by high-fat, low-carbohydrate diets.” 6. Until World War I Americans ate roughly equal amounts of purchased and produced food, but by the late 1990s, 98 percent of the food consumed in the United States was purchased (Pillsbury 1998, 107). APPENDIX 4

1. Maegan Crandall, student assistant, conducted background research on the herbs mentioned here.

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Alberjones—dried yellow peas. Amole—soaproot. Arroz con pollo—rice with chicken. Atole—drink made from blue corn meal and water, with salt or sugar, also known as chaqueue. Biscochitos—cookies, especially the popular cookies made with lard and anise for Christmas and other special occasions. Bolitas—small pink beans traditionally grown in the Antonito area. Bruja/o—witch. Buñuelos—fried bread or rolls. Burriñates—pig, sheep or beef intestines, cleaned and roasted. Calabacitas—little round green pumpkins or squashes. Capulines—chokecherries. Carne adobada—grilled, marinated meat. Carne seca—dried meat, jerky. Chamiso—sagebrush. Champes—rose hips. Chaqueue—drink made from blue corn meal and water, with salt or sugar, also known as atole. Chicos—dried tender corn kernels. Chile—the chile pepper. Chile caribe—fresh coarse-ground dried red chile pepper. Chili—the basic dish cooked with red or green chile peppers, garlic, spices, and pork (green chili) or beef (red chili). Comadre—“co-mother”: a fictive kin relationship defining the woman who sponsors one’s child at baptism. Comino—cumin. Compadre—“co-father”: a fictive kin relationship defining the man who sponsors one’s child at baptism. Cueritos—pork skins. Curandera/o—healer.

Cusco or cuzco—greedy. Dicho—saying, proverb. Empanaditas—fried pastry turnovers made with meat or pumpkin filling. Envidia—envy, jealousy. Dobladitos—tortillas folded over and then baked. Habas—horse beans. H’ita, h’ito—contraction of hijita, hijito, literally little daughter, little son—a widely used term of affection. Hondra—a Mass held for a dead person five days after the burial. Horno—outdoor oven, used for baking bread, making chicos, and other things. Lengua—beef tongue. Llano—the plains, the flat dry area east of Antonito. Malva—dwarf mallow. Manzanilla—chamomile. Manzanitas—small edible berries. Maravilla—common marigold. Menudo—tripe soup. Morcillas—blood sausages. Olla—pot or cauldron. Ollita—little pot. Oshá—lovage, a widely used medicinal herb used to counter infections and witchcraft. Panocha—sprouted wheat pudding. Panza—the cooked stomach of the sheep or lamb. Penitentes—members of a religious brotherhood who practiced ascetic Catholicism. Piñón—pine nut. Plumajillo—yarrow. Poleo—spearmint. Pozole—corn soaked in lime and dried. Quelites—lambs’ quarters, known as wild spinach. Queso—cheese: the white cheese made from cow’s milk in a form of about a pound and eaten fresh. Ravitos—green onions. Riñones—beef kidneys. Ristras—strings of dried chile peppers. Rotabagas—rutabagas. Semita—bran flour. Sesinas, sesinitas—strips of dried meat, jerky. Siete condados del norte—“the seven contiguous rural counties in northern New Mexico and southern Colorado that have Chicana/o demographic majorities” (Martínez 1998, 70). Sopa—bread pudding.

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Sopaipillas—fried dough, usually shaped in a half-moon or triangle. Tasol—feed for the cattle. Torta huevo—beaten eggs fried like biscuits. Velorio—wake. Verdolagas—purslane. Yerba buena—peppermint.

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I N D E X

Abarca, Meredith, 9, 124, 212n7, 221n3, 221n10, 222n4 Abeyta, Aaron, 213n13 Abu-Jaber, Diana, 135, 221n9 acequias, 59–60, 217n19, 217n20, 217n21, 217n22, 217n23. See also water Adams State College, xiv, 15, 16, 19, 36 agency, 114–115, 220n1 Aguilar, Louis, 12, 212n12, 212n13 Ahearn, Laura M., 114 Alex and the Hobo, 6, 212n8, 223n5 Alianza Federal de las Mercedes, 48 Andrews, Margaret, 182, 225n5 Anglos: and Conejos County, settlement of, 10–11, 162; and Hispanics in Antonito, relations with, 3, 6, 9, 31, 35–36, 38–39, 40–42, 48, 50, 60, 159, 180, 211n3, 215n6 Antonito, CO: climate of, 24, 71, 216n18, 218n1; description of, 10–11, 23–26; diversity in, 22; population of, 12; poverty in, 12, 181–191; settlement of, 9–10 Apache, 9, 10 Appadurai, Arjun, 212n10 atole, 77, 78, 79, 83, 198, 219n11 Avakian, Arlene, 135, 221n9

Bakhtin, Mikhail, 168, 224n1 Basso, Keith H., 70 Baxter, L. B., 226n5

Bean, Luther, 212n13 beans, 72, 73, 75, 77, 78, 79, 82–84, 89, 101–102, 130–131, 147, 171, 175–177, 179, 183, 186, 193, 194, 198, 217n23, 219n12 Behar, Ruth, 211n5, 212n10, 223n9 Benmayor, Rina, 3, 43, 70, 114, 212n7 Bentley, Amy, 221n4 birthdays, 116, 124, 142–143 biscochitos, 76, 127–128, 131, 179, 221n8 Blend, Benay, 221n3, 221n10, 222n4 Bossard, James H. S., 221n1 Bove, Caron F., 221n1 Braiden, W. A. (Bill), 47, 215n9 Brembeck, Helen, 221n1 Briggs, Charles L., 214n2 brujas, 162, 163, 164, 223n7 Bureau of Land Management (BLM), 48, 49, 216n13, 216n14 Burgos-Debray, Elisabeth, 212n6 burriñates, 74, 79

Cabeza de Baca Gilbert, Fabiola, 9, 214n8, 218n3, 221n4, 225n6 calabacitas, 72–73, 75, 83, 147, 220n17 Calloway, Larry, 215n5 Campa, Arthur L., 212n13, 214n2 Carlson, Alvar W., 46, 105, 182, 225n5 Carlson, Steven, 182, 225n5 Carrington, Christopher, 221n1 Casias, Tina, 188–190

Catron, Thomas, 48 cattle, 11, 73, 79, 156–157, 194, 195, 196 Chameros, 78, 219n12 champes, 79, 86, 87–88, 89, 100, 102, 184 chaqueue. See atole Charles, Nickie, 221n1, 221n10 cheese, 74–75, 103–104, 155, 165, 219n9 Chicano: activism, 191, 225n7; cultural ecology, 69–70; environmentalism, xiii, 4, 70, 90, 200; movement, 39 chickens, 74, 106–108 chicos, 17, 77, 78, 83, 119, 198 chili: and conflict, 130–132, 134–135; in diet, 73, 77, 78, 79, 85–86, 88, 100, 186, 193, 194, 198; at funeral dinner, 175–177, 179; sold by Chameros, 219n12; at wake, 168–172 Cobos, Rubén, 158, 219n10, 220n17, 222n3 Colorado Doctrine, 59 Coltrane, Scott, 112, 145, 220n2, 221n3, 222n4 Colwin, Laurie, 135, 221n9 Conejos County: agriculture in, 195, 226n2; Hispanic population of, 213n15; poverty of, 12, 181–182, 191; settlement of, 10 Conejos Land Grant, 10, 46, 58, 214n4 Conejos River, 10, 45–46, 61, 62–64, 217n28 Conlin, Dolores, 26 cookbooks, 94, 125 cooking: and agency, 114–136; and conflict, 129–130, 132, 134–135; and creativity, 121–122, 124; and emotional connection, 122–124, 221n7; expectations, 120–121; and gender, 117, 129–136; and inadequacy, 115– 117, 118, 132, 134–135; learning of, 125–129; and marriage, 120–121, 130–133; and men, 129–135, 221n7; and Mexicanas, 117–118, 221n3, 221n4; and recipes, 78, 115–116, 124, 127–129; rejection of, 117–118

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Counihan, Carole M., 20, 39, 130, 145, 211n2, 212n3, 221n1, 221n3, 221n5, 221n10, 222n3, 222n6, 223n8, 225n7 courtship, 92–96 Crawford, Stanley, 217n19, 217n21 cultural citizenship, Latino, xiii, 3, 43, 114, 200 Cumbres and Toltec Railroad, 12, 54, 213n19 curanderas, 164–166 cusco. See cuzco cuzco, 158–161, 222n3, 223n5

Davis, Malia, 225n7 De Anda, Roberto M., 222n2 DeHerrera, Janice, 15, 17–18, 23–25, 45, 66, 101–103, 104, 111–112, 117, 120–124, 125–127, 128–129, 137–139, 141–142, 143, 144, 145, 146–147, 150–151, 155, 172–173, 180, 182, 183, 186, 187–188, 190– 191, 198–199, 221n6 de la Torre, Adela, 222n2 Denver and Rio Grande Railroad, 10 Denver Post, 28 Deutsch, Sarah, 7, 10, 42, 47, 50, 91, 211n3, 212n12, 213n3, 213n13, 213n16, 214n3, 215n6, 215n8, 216n10, 219n4, 222n5, 222n8, 225n6 DeVault, Marjorie L., 221n1, 221n10, 222n6 diabetes, 196, 226n5 diet of Antonito: changing, 193, 196– 200; past, 72–78, 193; protection against hunger from, 183–186 Diner, Hasia R., 226n4 discrimination: against Anglos, 35–36, 39–40; against Hispanics, 6, 34–43; religious, 36–39; against women, 34, 36–38. See also Anglos Douglas, Mary, 180, 221n1

Eckert, Jerry, 213n13 ecology, Chicano cultural. See under Chicano

eggs. See chickens Ellis, Rhiann, 221n10, 222n6 Elsasser, Nan, 9, 22, 214n4 empanaditas, 73, 76, 82, 86, 104, 159 Engels, Frederick, 220n1 English language: associated with business, 26; imposed in school, 26–30; taught by Presbyterians, 30–31. See also language envidia. See envy envy: and greed, 158–162; and witchcraft, 162–166, 223–224n9 Esquivel, Laura, 220n13 ethics, American Anthropological Association code of, 211n4 ethnic identity, 22, 31–43 ethnic terminology, 22, 31–32, 40, 42, 43 ethnography: feminist, xiii, 3; fieldwork in, 4–6; methodology in, 7–9; practice of, 20–21

family: and meals, 52–53, 137–151, 221n1, 222n3; meanings of, 138– 139; Mexicano, 222n2; stresses on, 138 farewell dinners, 172–180 farmers’ market, Alamosa, 198, 199 feminism, Latina, xiii, 3, 200 Figgen, Kathi, 4 Filoteo, Janie, 222n2 Fish, Larry, 217n24 Fisher, M. F. K., 135, 221n9 fishing, 52, 62–63, 80–82, 130, 133–134, 158, 185, 220n16 Flores, William, 3, 43, 70, 114, 222n9 food: and canning, 75; changing meanings of, 198–199; and conservation ethos, 72, 150–151, 218n2; and drying, 72–74; and freezing, 80; at funerals, 172–180; as gifts for deceased’s family, 168, 171–172, 172–174; and globalization, 193, 199; and insecurity, 181–191; for Lent, 77; of Northern New Mexico, 9, 72, 78, 198, 218n3, 221n4; preservation of, 99–103; at wakes,

169–172, 174; at weddings, 169; and witchcraft, 163–166, 223n8, 223n9; writing, 135, 221n9. See also diet of Antonito; meals; meat; plant foods food bank, 188–191 food-centered life histories, 7–9 Food Stamps, 182, 188, 191, 225n2, 225n5 Fourth of July foods, 193–196, 226n1 funeral homes, 170, 172, 224n3 funerals, 168, 170–180

Gallegos, Joseph C., 217n19, 217n21, 217n23 Ganados del Valle cooperative, 70, 218n31 Gándara, Patricia, 30 Garcia, Anna, 47, 103, 106, 129, 172, 211n1 García, Ignacio M., 214n9 García, Reyes Roberto, 32, 213n13, 215n8 gardens, 54, 61, 67–69, 72, 75, 83–85, 89–90, 101, 107, 153, 194–196, 218n3 gender: and division of labor, 91–92, 96–97; expectations, 97–99; identity, 91–92, 109–113; relations, 112 generosity. See sharing Gladwell, Malcolm, 196 Gluck, Sherna Berger, 211n5 Gonzales, Manuel G., 45, 211n3 Gonzales, Phillip B., 45, 46, 211n3, 216n12 Gordon, Deborah A., 211n5, 212n10 Gorras Blancas, 216n10 Gramsci, Antonio, 114, 212n7, 220n2 granjeador, 158 Greater Mexico, 9 greed. See envy gringo, 33, 40, 214n7 Gutierrez, Paul, 213n13

Hamman, R. F., 226n5 Hauck-Lawson, Annie, 221n10

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Head, Lafayette, 10 Herrera, Guillermo, 196 Hildner, Matt, 59, 217n25, 217n27 Hintlian, Persephone, 222n5 Hispanos, 32, 40, 214n4, 214n5, 218n31 Hofferth, Sandra L., 221n1 homesteading, 46–47, 54, 55, 215n7 honey, 75, 156–157 Howard, Patricia L., 89 hunger: in Antonito, 181–191; protection from in traditional diet, 184– 186; in school, 184, 187–188; and sharing, 183–185 hunting, 80–82, 101, 110, 185, 194, 196, 220n16

immigrants, 32, 33, 42 Indo Hispano, 32, 214n5 Inness, Sherrie A., 220n1, 221n10

Japanese American farmers, 105 Jaquez, José Maria, 10 Jaramillo, Cleofas, 9, 47, 214n8, 218n3, 221n4, 225n6 jerky, 74, 80–82, 99, 100

Kahn, Miriam, 222n1 Kansas City Star, 28 Kerr, Marion, 221n1, 221n10 Kutsche, Paul, 214n2

lambe, 40, 159 Lamphere, Louise, 220n1 land: acquisition and loss, 45–50, 215n6; and family, 48–50, 51–54, 56–57; grants 45–46, 214n4, 214n5; meanings of, 44, 50–58 language: and freedom of speech, 27; Spanish vs. English use, 5, 26–31, 151, 213n1. See also English; Spanish La Raza Unida, 32, 39, 214n9 lard, 73, 74, 76, 77, 84, 195, 219n7, 221n8

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Larson, Robert W. 211n3, 216n10 Latina Feminist Group, 212n6, 212n7 Leacock, Eleanor Burke, 220n1 Levenstein, Harvey, 226n4 Limón, José E., 212n11 Lloyd, Jillian, 217n24 Lopez, Carmen, 19, 35, 104, 153, 158– 161, 181, 222n4 Lorde, Audre, 40 Luján, Ida M., 217n19, 218n30

MacKenzie, Kyle, 22, 214n4 Madrid, Arturo, 22, 214n4 Madrid, Teddy, 14, 15–16, 26, 27, 31, 32, 34, 35, 36–38, 40–42, 46, 47, 56–58, 61–65, 69–70, 72, 78, 80–82, 84–85, 86, 87–88, 92, 96, 100, 109–111, 113, 115–118, 130–133, 139, 144, 148– 150, 153, 179–180, 183–185, 190, 194, 200, 213n1, 214n6, 218n28 Manning, C. K., 221n1 Manos Negras, 216n10 Marquez, Joe, 51–52 marriage, 92–96 Marsh, Charles, 213n13 Marshall, J. A., 207, 226n5 Martin, Patricia Preciado, 9, 214n8, 219n8, 221n8 Martínez, Rubén, 10, 45, 213n13, 213n15, 214–215n5, 215n7, 215n8, 218n2 Mauss, Marcel, 152–153, 222n1, 225n8 meals: and conflict, 145; content of, 120–121, 147; and families, blended, 126–127, 141–142; and family, 52–53, 137–151, 221n1, 222n3; and gender, 143–146; and grace, 148–149; meanings of, 122–123; and socialization, 126–127, 146–151; threat from television to, 140–141 meat, 72–74, 79–82, 156–157, 194, 196, 220n14 Mechling, Jay, 222n5 Menchú, Rigoberta, 212n6 menudo, 74, 79, 83, 194, 198, 199 Mestas, Naomi, 46, 162

methodology, 7–9 Mexican-American War, 9, 46 Mitchell, Tiffany, 221n1 Mondragon, Asuncionita, 17, 18, 19, 61, 83, 106–108, 129, 142, 151, 153, 155 Mondragon, Martha, 17, 18, 19, 32, 140–141, 142, 144, 148, 150, 173– 174, 194, 198 Mondragon-Valdéz, Maria, 60, 215n5, 215n8 Montaño, Mario, 221n4 Moore, Henrietta, 220n1 moradas, 47, 170 Morales, Maria Cristina, 222n2 morcillas, 74, 79 Mormons, 10, 101, 173, 178, 213n14, 220n3 multiple prejudice, 36

Nabhan, Gary Paul, 196 Native Americans, 3, 31, 53–54, 60, 162, 193 Navajo, 9, 10 Nelson, Kathryn J., 212n7 Nelson, Mary, 221n1 Nord, Mark, 182, 225n5

Ornelas, Cordi, 17, 18, 78, 109, 117, 124, 153–154, 163, 169 Ortiz, Christopher, 215n5 Osburn, Katherine, 213n13 oshá, 89, 163, 223n9 Owens, Anna, 213n21

paella, 124 panocha, 76, 77, 78, 79, 171, 198 Pardo, Mary, 191 Paredes, Américo, 9, 211n3 Patai, Daphne, 211n5 Pathfinder, 28 Pearson, Barbara Zurer, 30 Peña, Devon, 4, 44, 46, 47, 59, 60, 66, 70, 90, 199, 211n3, 213n13, 214n1, 214n2, 214–215n5, 215n8, 216n12,

217n19, 217n20, 217n21, 217n23, 219n4 Penitentes, 47, 169–170, 216n10, 224n4 People’s Party, 216n10 Pérez, Ramona Lee, 9 perlite, 11, 12, 19, 34, 213n17 Pesquera, Beatríz M., 220n2, 221n3, 222n4 pigs, 73, 79, 103, 116, 117, 219n5, 219n6 Pilcher, Jeffrey M., 220n15, 223n9 Pillsbury, Richard, 226n6 piñon, 73, 86–87, 185, 198, 220n18 plant foods: cultivated, 82–86; medicinal, 88–89; wild, 86–89 Platoro Dam, 64, 217n25, 217–218n28 Pong, Dolores Valdez de, 213n13, 216n15 potatoes, 72–73, 77–78, 79, 82, 83, 84, 90, 100, 101, 104, 105, 115–117, 130, 133–134, 135, 145, 153, 169, 171, 174, 175, 176, 186, 193, 194, 195, 198, 199, 217n22, 221n7 poverty, 12, 90, 167, 181–183 pozole, 78, 83, 194, 199, 219n12 prejudice. See discrimination; racism Presbyterians, 30–31, 36, 37, 38, 148, 149, 178, 179–180, 190, 213n3, 222n8 Pretty, Jules, 221n1 production/reproduction dichotomy, 92 Pulido, Laura, 12, 70, 211n3, 215n8, 218n31

quelites, 77, 79, 86, 87, 158, 184 queso. See cheese quinceañera, 127

racism, 34 Rael, Juan B., 4, 211n1, 224n4 Randall, Margaret, 135, 221n9 reciprocity. See sharing Reichl, Ruth, 135, 221n9 respect, 148–149, 222n9 Revista Católica, La, 28

Index

251

Riddiough, Christine, 222n7 Rio Arriba County, 45, 46, 47, 66, 214n2, 214n3, 218n30 Rio Grande National Forest (RGNF), 56, 58, 215n6, 216n16, 216n17 Rio Grande region, Upper, xiii, 3, 10, 32; foodways in, 9 Rio Grande River Compact, 60, 217n25, 217n28 rites of passage, 166, 224n2 Rivera, José A., 59, 60, 217n19, 217n20 Rochín, Refugio I., 222n2 Romero, Celina, 19, 96, 105–106, 169, 172 Romero, Mary, 4 Rosaldo, Michelle Zimbalist, 220n1 Rosaldo, Renato, 222n9 Rosales, F. Arturo, 29, 211n3, 214n9, 216n12 rosary, 170–172, 174, 224n5 Rosenbaum, Robert J., 211n3, 216n10 Roth, Luanne K., 221n1 Ruiz, Vicki L., 220n2 Ruybal, Eloyda, 78 Ruybal, Helen, 14–15, 20–21, 26, 29–30, 33, 35–36, 48–50, 79–80, 82, 86–87, 91, 92–96, 97–99, 103–104, 112, 117–120, 129, 133–134, 143, 153, 156–158, 159–162, 163, 164–166, 170–172, 176–179, 192, 193, 214n7, 216n14, 219n12, 222n4, 223n9

Sacks, Karen, 220n1 Saenz, Rogelio, 222n2 Sahlins, Marshall, 222n1 Salazar, Yolanda, 19, 129, 142–143, 154, 175, 186 Salazar Trading Post, 198, 199 Sanchez, Frederick C., 48, 216n11 Sandberg, John E., 221n1 San Luis Valley Project, 217n25, 217n28 Sargent, Lydia, 220n1 school: and English language imposition, 26–31; hours, 225n4; lunches, 187; McCurdy, 194, 225n3 secret recipes, 128–129

252

A

T O R T I L L A

I S

L I K E

L I F E

Segura, Denise A., 220n2 sharing: and equality, 155, 159; food, 155–158, 159, 160, 183–185; labor, 153–154; meanings of, 152–153 sheep, 11, 47, 48, 49, 70, 73, 79, 133, 153, 185, 195, 215n6, 218n31 siete condados del norte, 10, 45, 59, 91, 212n13, 213n15 Silvestrini, Bianca, 4 Simmons, Virginia McConnell, 213n13 Sobal, Jeffery, 221n1 Sociedad Protección Mutua de Trabajadores Unidos (SPMDTU), 47, 216n11 soda pop, 195–196 sopa, 76, 77, 79 sopaipillas, 77, 82, 120, 194, 195 Spanish: language loss, 26–31, 213n1; periodicals, 28–29; pride in, 33, 34; shame for speaking, 29; teaching at meals, 151. See also language spirituality, 53–55 Stevens, Sidney, 226n1 Stockmeyer, Chris, 221n1 Stoller, Marianne L., 9, 46, 212n12, 213n14, 214n2 Sutton, David E., 124 Swadesh, Frances León, 10, 26, 91, 109, 212n12, 213n14, 214n2, 214n5, 214n6, 215n6, 216n12, 218n3, 219n11, 225n6

Taggart, Ben, 5 Taggart, James, 4, 6, 8, 32, 34, 105, 117, 153, 158, 159, 162, 211n3, 212n8, 213n13, 222n2 (Ch. 8), 222n5, 222n9, 223n5, 224n4 Taggart, Will, 5 Taylor, José Inez (Joe), 6, 8, 18, 31–32, 34, 117, 153, 158, 159, 162, 193–194, 211n3, 212n8, 213n13, 222n2 (Ch. 8), 222n5, 222n9, 223n5, 224n4 Taylor, Monica, 17, 18–19, 51–55, 66–69, 71, 83, 97, 101, 104, 112, 127–128, 129, 134–135, 198, 221n7 Taylor ranch, 214–215n5 testimonios, 7–8, 211–212n6

Thursby, Jacqueline S., 166, 180, 224n1 Thurston, Robert, 162 Tierra Amarilla Land Grant, 47, 216n12 Tijerina, Reies López, 47, 216n12 Tixier y Vigil, Yvonne, 22, 214n4 tortillas, 73, 76, 78, 82, 103, 104, 118, 120, 128, 129, 131, 132, 145, 147, 169, 177, 179, 186, 193, 194, 195 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, 9, 46 Trujillo, Atanacio, 10 Trujillo, Luis M., 158, 223n7 Tushar, Olibama López, 213n13

Utes, 9, 10

Valdez, Elsa O., 112, 145, 220n2, 221n3, 222n4 Valdez, Olivama Salazar de, 213n13, 216n15 Valdez, Ramona, 15, 16–17, 26, 28–29, 32, 33, 34, 38–39, 46, 48, 55–56, 72–78, 83, 88–89, 103, 104–105, 124, 139, 163, 195, 219n5, 219n7 Van Gennep, Arnold, 177, 224n2 Van Ness, John R., 214n2 Vélez-Ibáñez, Carlos G., 138 velorios. See wakes verdolagas, 72, 77, 86, 184 Videon, T. M., 221n1 Vigil, Bernadette, 19, 22, 26, 34–35, 39–40, 85–86, 129–130, 145, 159, 182–183, 225n7 Voz del Pueblo, La, 28

wakes, 169–172, 174, 179, 224n3, 224n5 water: carrying, 63, 68; as commodity 59, 60, 64–66, 217n24; conservation, 60–61, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67; fights, 59, 60, 217n21, 218n30; and gender, 69, 218n30; irrigation systems, 60, 64, 217n22, 217n27; law, 59–60; loss, 60, 64–65, 68–69; making ice with, 62; meanings and uses of, 60–70; scarcity, 58–59, 68–69. See also acequias; Rio Grande River Compact Weber, Kenneth R., 213n13, 217n19 Weigle, Marta, 10, 48, 213n16, 214n2, 215n6, 218n3, 224n4, 224n5 Wilk, Richard, 222n5 Williams, Brett, 221n1, 221n3, 222n4 witchcraft, 152, 162–167, 223n6, 223n7, 223n8, 223–224n9 Wolf, Margery, 211n5, 212n10 women’s work, 91–92, 96–97, 99–113, 219n4, 220n2. See also gender Wood, Roy, 221n1

Ybarra, L., 220n2, 221n3, 222n4 Yin, Sandra, 222n1 Young, Michael, 222n1 (Ch. 8), 222n3 (Ch. 7) Young, Richard K., 213n13

Zavella, Patricia, 22, 143, 221n3 Zentella, Ana Celia, 30

Index

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