Other’s foods: limpiezas y la comida
I leave the lands of our acequia farm to engage in a promised critical appraisal of recent work in the anthropology of food. One especially good recent collection of essays on anthropological and cultural studies of food (Counihan 2002) presents an intriguing range of contributions on “just what food means to Americans.”
Here we go again, I thought, when I first started reading the book: Another set of deconstructed Happy Meals.
The contributors actually cover much wider ground and this includes an excellent essay on the political economy of global food production (Friedmann) and a decent critical treatment of the environmental, political, and economic problems posed by agricultural biotechnologies (Middendorf et al).
However, the editor (Counihan) and her husband ethnographer (Taggert) contribute two separately-authored chapters on food in the San Luis Valley in Colorado that I find incredibly problematic and indicative once again of a type of anthropology badly in need of getting grounded in the two meanings of the term I have adopted for this paper.
Counihan starts well enough intent on revealing how Hispana women’s food-centered stories break through the silences in the discourse on food and culture. She asserts, “…food can be a channel of oppression.” Yet: “Because food is so often the work and language of women, food stories emphasize the importance of women and challenges [sic] the centrality of men.” (2002:295) In the end, the author presents a fairly bleak picture of a patriarchal culture that forces women, really one woman, Counihan’s source, to “cook for others” and yet insists that women, or at least this particular woman, must remain invisible in the kitchen.
This essay over-generalizes from one interview to an entire culture and its history of food practices. It simply overlooks the rich nuances in Chicana/o gendered divisions of labor surrounding food production, processing, preparation, and sharing.
There is a lot of differentiation in who grows, cultivates, harvests, processes, prepares, serves and shares food in Chicana/o communities but, like many other groups, this follows more complex age, class, national origin, as well as gendered locations that are actually quite fluid and intersecting from one family to the next and within the same family over time. Chicana/os are not fixated on one immutable gendered division of labor when it comes to food production and consumption as Counihan misleadingly suggests.
The men of the San Luis Valley are no more central to food production than women are presumably to food preparation. Chicanas, as Sarah Deutsch (1989) demonstrated two decades ago have had to take command of farming operations in the Rio Arriba acequia communities since at least the 1880s when men often left for work in mining camps, sugar beet plantations, or sheep camps as far north as Wyoming and Montana.
Men have always played a significant role in food preparation. During my first sabbatical at Colorado College (1990-91), I lived and worked at the Gallegos Ranches in San Luis. Yvette Gallegos was retired from a successful career as a schoolteacher while Corpus A. Gallegos had returned from an equally distinguished career as a teacher and principal. They were hosting me at their ranch. Corpus did most of the cooking including a wonderful breakfast served at 5 a.m. before we set out on daily farm chores. Corpus always prepared this multi-course breakfast since Yvette insisted we needed energy to carry us through the morning tasks. This typically consisted of grilled vegetables from the kitchen garden, home-cut bacon, huevos con papas fritas, chicos-bolitas stew, and tortillas with roasted green chiles.
Yvette still fancied canning and she continued to process, with all the men helping, the farm’s produce. The Gallegos’ cupboards were filled with chokecherry jam, elderberry jelly, and other home kitchen-processed foods.
There was a spirit of collaboration across age, gender, and city/village resident status. This issued from the kitchen, which was the business nerve center of the household, to the fields, acequias, orchards, and beyond into la Sierra. I should note that in my family, my Father-in-Law is the cook; always has been. When I visit, he serves me a Laredo version of the breakfast Corpus prepared for me in San Luis. In my own household, my wife and I usually share cooking duties everyday and are most delighted when we can share a gastronomic innovation with our friends and neighbors down in San Luis.
Regardless of the cook’s gender, there is one thing I am absolutely certain about: The families, at least those I have dined with over the decades that I have spent researching acequia farms while sharing heritage foods and bioregional cuisines in the Rio Arriba, all want to eat together.
As Esteva and Prakash (1999:55, 65-7) have noted, la comida (the shared meal) is at the heart of the food culture of Mexican-origin peoples everywhere. That is not a stereotype but a serious observable pattern of preferred cultural organization and behavior. Sharing a meal is a signifying event of utmost importance because it conveys a commitment to conviviality – the act of sharing is what the meal is about and not just nutrition.
While Counihan acknowledges “Hispanics expressed sociability and social equality by sharing food,” she also notes that they “marked class differences and borders by not eating together.” (2002: 299) She goes on to describe how “People in Antonito defined class according to wealth and education” and how “Hispanics from the laboring classes rarely ate in the homes of the wealthy Hispanic landowners and professionals.” Class breaks down the conviviality of food in Counihan’s take on the gendered food practices of Colorado Hispanics [sic].
In Counihan’s version, the father of her primary informant refused to share food, least of all with Anglos, because this refusal meant he “refuted the class subordination expressed through making food for others.” (2002:300)
James M. Taggert echoes this theme of class division in an equally misguided take on masculinity and food among the Hispano men of Antonito. Taggert mismanages the information provided by his singular ethnographic source. In this version of Hispanic food ways, food becomes a hidden code for class stratification and resistance.
According to Taggert (2002) people in the San Luis Valley do not cross class divisions to eat together. The working class eats in its space separate from los ricos (the rich) who have their own differentiated space.
However, this too is something I do not recognize at all in San Luis, Antonito, or any other acequia community I have had the privilege of visiting in response to invitations for la comida. It seems intriguing that Anglo anthropologists appear overly preoccupied with demonstrating that, gosh darn it, Mexicans are just as riddled by patriarchy and class hierarchy as any other ethnic group and we therefore need to stop romanticizing these folk as paragons of some equitable and sustainable future. That is the subtext I disentangle from these two essays.
The sharing of food, la comida, at least in San Luis, Antonito, and other acequia farming villages in the Rio Arriba that I know first hand as a resident farmer and fellow gastronome, is precisely one of the most significant “sociable” events that is used to cut across class, gender, and racial divisions.
It must be understood as well that the imaginary world of ricos y pobres (rich and poor) in the Counihan-Taggert narrative is a bit of a stretch since the acres separating “wealthy” and “poor” landowners is negligible at best (although there are growing numbers of landless Chicana/os in our bioregion).
Also, every person, at least within the context of acequia culture, labors long and hard hours at farm and ranch work; no one is above getting their hands dirty since all of these are small family farms. Everyone in the acequia community is in other words part of “the laboring class.” For example, no one escapes
la limpieza (0r
saca), the annual ritual of the communal work of springtime irrigation ditch clean-up.
The annual Saca y Limpieza de La Acequia de la Gente de San Luis de la Culebra, which I participated in this April 19, involves a multi-generational, mixed gender and mixed class contingent of helpers. This year, about eight of the forty-two crewmembers were women. The largest landowner has about 160 acres of irrigated land; the smallest has about ten acres. Both shared equally in the work of ditch maintenance.
In the middle of our cleanup day, there was a two-hour break for la comida, a communal meal prepared by two men and three women who used local organic ingredients and recipes handed down over the generations. The multi-course meal became the endless subject of our “idle chit-chat” as we traded glowing reports about how that corn in the chicos stew came from Sally Chavez’s garden or how those outstanding creamy bolita beans came from the Gallegos boys and so on.
Everyone present – male and female, young and old, and large or small landholder – understood that the Acequia Madre cleanup in April is a necessary precondition for the production and preparation of the meal we shared that day. These interconnections are silenced when anthropologists, however progressive and supportive they might be, quickly rush to pen the next best critique of patriarchy and masculinity in Mexican communities, obscuring the changing practices of our dynamic and ever-expanding networks of local ‘foodies.’
I just don’t believe that, epistemologically, it is a very good idea to engage in remotely directed research even over a period of long visits and many years. Grounding any given anthropology of food requires sustained participation in the entire local food system. It is this system that seems absent in these accounts by Counihan and Taggert.
There are some significant differences between San Luis and Antonito in matters of food, class, race, and gender. I believe these are rooted in the organization of the food systems in each community. Both communities include original Chicana/o settlements that date back to claims based on Mexican-period mercedes (the Conejos grant in Antonito and the Sangre de Cristo grant in San Luis). Both have long-established acequia systems but the level of organization regionally has the San Luis-area acequia associations well ahead of Antonito. Many of the acequias in Conejos County have taken hard hits and have even lost significant portions of quite senior water rights.
Agriculture remains a vital force in both areas and there are many remaining multigenerational farming families, both Chicana/o and white. Antonito is located in Conejos County, an area that was demographically and religiously transformed beginning in the late 1870s with the establishment of Mormon communities and later railroad grid towns settled through in-migration of white Americans including many Midwesterners. San Luis never experienced such a demographic and cultural transformation and remains a predominantly Mexican-origin and Catholic community.
To some extent, this was a consequence of geography: The establishment of railroad grid-towns in our own Costilla County was limited to the higher plateau desert scrub country around present-day town sites like Fort Garland and Blanca to the north and Mesita and Jaroso to the South-Southwest, some 10 to 30 miles from the Culebra bottomlands.
This is where the industrial monocultures, with their center-pivot irrigation circles, were established, far away enough from the acequia-hood that their disruptive influence was limited to the usurpation of more than half of the original water rights decreed to acequias in a legal battle stretching from the 1880s to the early 1900s. (Hicks and Peña 2003)
Antonito has grocery chain stores, convenience marts, and fast food outlets. San Luis has none of these. Much of the agriculture in the Antonito area does involve larger homesteaded acreage irrigated by mechanical sprinklers in alfalfa-hay monoculture production. Some corporate seed potato and potato growers are also evident. Grain producers and other fairly large thousand-acre operators are producing biodiesel and ethanol fuel sources (canola, sunflower, and corn) and becoming a bigger part of the reshaping of the environs of Antonito and its neighboring towns. Cattle ranches west of the Rio Bravo are much larger than those east of the river.
However, the practice of maintaining home kitchen gardens, orchards, and polyculture milpas appears to have fallen by the wayside across much of the Antonito area although some acequia farm families in Ortiz, Mogote, Conejos, and other largely Hispana/o rural hamlets still raise home kitchen gardens or maintain family orchards.
Another difference is that the acequia ranchers in Antonito have access to grazing permits on public lands while Chicana/os in the San Luis area do not have immediate access since all the local headwater forests are privately owned. Many Antonito-area acequia ranchers run cattle in federal public domain areas located within the Conejos watershed in the Rio Grande National Forest and BLM-administered holdings.
Costilla County has no such public lands and it was only in 2002 that the courts restored grazing rights to the enclosed land grant commons, another important story that lies beyond my scope today. The dependence of the acequia ranchers on grazing permits in the high country likely changes local food practices as well since it marks a shift away from a focus on polyculture milpa agroecosystems. Ranching on public lands carries a different set of strong relationships but it lacks the dense network of social interactions focused around food production and consumption that farming creates.
I think that together these conditions – the availability of grocery stores, convenience marts, and fast food outlets; the decline of home kitchen gardens and orchards and therefore the loss of heritage cuisines, canning, and food preservation practices; the demographic shifts that produced greater class stratification and altered the quality of agriculture into a form dominated by larger corporate-styled operators; the corresponding decline of acequia governance; and the displacement of Hispano males from traditional skilled artisan craftwork and hence a retreat into the home as a patriarchal refuge – contribute to a sharpening and heightening of racial, class, and gender divisions in Antonito that perhaps do get played out in some of the ways described by Counihan and Taggert.
In contrast to this, however, the smaller family farms of San Luis-area acequia farmers continue to produce many of their own local crops that are destined for home consumption, local barter, and sales. These include chicos, bolitas, calabacitas, alberjones, habas, and many other staple vegetables and orchard crops. This does not mean we are fixated on static traditions or are failing to adapt and change.
Culebra acequia farmers are engaged in wholesale and retail marketing of organic heirloom chicos and bolitas. These crops fetch premium prices in Taos, Santa Fe, Albuquerque, Denver, Pueblo, and Colorado Springs. The most successful marketing of organic heirloom “value-added” products in San Luis involves “Pepitas,” a heritage cuisine company started by three local Chicanas with deep roots in the acequia tradition. Surely, Counihan would not object to women in acequia farm communities organizing themselves to make a good living by retailing traditional recipes and mixes, in effect creating livelihoods by “cooking for others.”
This is Part 6 of 8 of an original as yet unpubished essay prepared by invitation for the Department of Anthropology, Spring 2008 Colloquium, “Epistemologies of Anthropological Research,” University of Washington, May 23, 2008. It is presented here free of the footnotes in the original. Sources cited in the text will be posted at the end of the series of 8.
This is a work in progress; please do not quote, cite, or circulate without the author’s permission. Send inquiries to: dpena@u.washington.edu. The author thanks Elaine H. Peña and Mario Montaño for comments on earlier drafts.
