El Rito, CO. Our 2010 harvest season is quickly coming to a close. We have picked the last of our heirloom white floury-flint corn known as maíz de concho, which we have been roasting for several weeks in our adobe ovens to make chicos, a winter store food for hot stews that awaken the senses on a cold morning or evening. In the Culebra watershed, most of us are now waiting patiently for the heirloom maíz de concho, habas (Fava beans) and bolitas (beige beans) to dry on their plants so we can finish the season's seed collecting and saving.
With all the activity surrounding chicos production, it is easy to overlook the other principal activity we have been engaging during the past two weeks: Collecting seed from the milpas. This has been a good year for our seed-stock production. Last year, I nearly lost all my maize seed to critters. I got careless during a hectic sabbatical. This year, I was more vigilant and also had very good help. We are bringing in a bumper crop of heirloom maíz de concho seed corn, about two barrels full.
We had not planned on making chicos at all this year, but in the end we had enough corn in the field to save seed and still make three hornos full of chicos, or a bit under 150 pounds. Not an overwhelming supply but it will please our local co-op and our friends and neighbors who can now count on having at least a little of this traditional winter-store food.
Bolita beans still on our minds
My followers may recall a blog entry from last year on the Bolita Bean Wars. I expressed concern at the time over the introduction of commercial hybrid versions of our native heirloom bolita bean. The Culebra watershed acequia communities are after all home to some important and distinct varieties of bolita bean (Phaseolis vulgaris or "common bean"). I will have to dwell on the "common" part of this scientific name in a moment.The introduced commercial hybrid varieties most likely came from Adobe Mills, Inc, based in not too distant Dove Creek, CO. They are the principal commercial producer of hybrid bolitas for the entire Four Corners bioregion. This was more likely an accidental introduction rather than the result of an incident in which a local farmer purchased hybrid stock from Adobe Mills as production seed.
We have not been able to identify anyone that has ever bought the hybrid variety from Adobe Mills with the intent to directly plant this variety. It is more likely that the Adobe Mills bolitas were sold at a local grocery store and someone either decided to plant instead of eat the beans, or the store-bought variety was somehow accidentally mixed in with a batch of some family's local heirloom seed. This seems plausible except that hybrid seed may not be as viable over generations as a local land race.
The source of concern is that many of the locally-sown bolitas appear like the Dove Creek hybrid and also do not have the traditional flavor, texture, or creaminess of the local heirloom. However, it turns out that there may have been at least two original local bolita strains - the bolita chiquita and the bolita grande or cuadrada, or at the very least, local people recall that they have had names for both of these two distinct varieties.
These memories date back at least two human generations. Bernadette Lucero, a fifth generation native of San Luis and leader in our local farmers' co-op, recalls her Father once explained that bolitas chiquitas were for local people and the grandes or cuadradas were for sale to visitors and outsiders.
This mystery will now likely be resolved when local farmers undertake a new plan for a collaborative plant breeding project working in consultation with the Organic Seed Alliance. The OSA visited San Luis area farmers on September 11, the second such visit in two years. The seed savers and plant breeders organization has made our acequia farms in Colorado and New Mexico a regular stop on their annual nation-wide tour.
In 2011, we will start a plant breeding project to determine which of the varieties grown by local farmers are true local heirloom bolitas. What we are learning is that it is not enough to save seed. That is only the first step. To protect heirloom crop diversity, we also have to be mindful farmers and avoid planting our heirlooms in settings that might expose the local varieties to cross-pollination with hybrids and, worse, transgenic crops. Constantly checking the morphology (appearance, structure, and color) and cuisine qualities of our heirloom crops is an additional responsibility of all acequia farmers committed to seed sovereignty.
To address some of these threats, we are currently working on the adoption of acequia by-laws that would ban the cultivation of commercial hybrid or transgenic varieties of corn, bean, and squash in our watershed. We also envision working with the Costilla County Commissioners to adopt a similar ban targeting the southern half of our county where the acequia farms are concentrated; the northern half of the county is dominated by large-scale corporate agribusinesses that irrigate with center-pivot mechanical sprinklers and are prone to monoculture practices.
Stay tuned to this blog for further developments as we continue to report on our local seed sovereignty campaign.
Renaming frijol
Underlying these efforts to protect and nurture local home-spun heirloom varieties are some larger questions of a philosophical and political nature. It fascinates me that the formal process for naming plant species and varieties actually seems like a not so subtle form of neo-colonialism.Take the official and scientific name of our cherished frijol variety, the bolita. It actually does not really have a scientific name of its own and is thrown in with numerous varieties under the single rubric of Phaseolis vulgaris, or the "common bean" as this is typically translated.
But the Latin root, vulgaris, has a complex meaning and a careful study of the underlying semiotics betray a sense of hierarchical class and race-based judgment in the act of naming something as "common," or "not special," "coarse," "unrefined," etc.
When I look at a handful of bolitas chiquitas in the palm of my hand, "common" is the last notion that enters my mind. These are rare specimens and as far as I can determine there are no more than a few dozen pounds of the small, round, and beige-colored variety among all acequia farmers in the Culebra watershed, including the two pounds of heirloom seed stock that I produced from my third year of breeding bolitas in a high altitude environment -- 8,100 feet at our Rancho Chiquito kitchen garden plot in El Rito (San Francisco), Colorado.
What makes the local bolita special is that it is able to withstand extreme frost exposure and what I like to characterize as "cold sunshine" because we have such radical diurnal extremes at this altitude with 30-40 degrees difference between the daily low and high temperatures. The two pounds of seed stock that I grew last year in El Rito withstood three late frosts - two in June and one after July 4. I think this qualifies the bolita strain as something other than designation as P. vulgaris.
The point of this is not to launch a campaign to challenge the hidden cultural politics of scientific nomenclature and biological classification. The point is to highlight how persistent this colonialist outlook has been over time. I want to suggest that Linnaeus certainly formalized this race and class hierarchy in biological classification when he imagined humankind to be split into different races including "wild men, dwarfs, troglodytes [cave dwellers], lazy Patagonians."
We can rename frijol and indeed we can draw our inspiration from the "folk name" for this unique high-altitude legume since we already have inherited a special name, "la bolita chiquita." I believe that when we "name" something we are not just classifying it so that we can identify and understand its place in our world. Part of marking the place of the "named" in the world is that it involves a rank-ordering and segregation of objects into categories that we deem "useful" or "threatening" and "neutral" or "benign."
The naming of something is also about our relationship to it. Here is where commonalities and distinctions become political judgments since the power to name something often translates into the power to control and manipulate that which is named. So, we invent categories like "noxious weeds" and wage a pesticide-laden war against the named threat. Or, we call something "vulgaris," and reduce it to uniform sameness.
We can invert this convention and rethink what we mean by "common." Back to the bolitas in the palm of my hand: These are rare, but they are also a shared part of our extended multi-generational cultural heritage: "The seed is the memory of the plant of how to grow well in this place," my Grandmother, Margarita K. Peña, used to tell me.
The heirloom seeds in my palm are not "common" but rather part of our "commons." As a seed saved, the bolita has the power to help the entire community thrive and to continue to adapt to life at 8,000 feet above sea level and a 70-80 day growing season. We are pushing the limits of what is possible with the "Three Sisters" in North American agriculture in this high alpine desert. It is the inherited "wisdom" of seeds saved and passed unto the next generations that is the source of our resilient livelihoods.
In the end, the renaming and reclaiming of bolitas chiquitas is a transformation of the seed into an emblem of our autonomy. Seed sovereignty is meaningful if it is part of an equitably self-governed community of practice that has the capacity to protect all the qualities of place that sustain our local culture, language, ethical orientations, and customary law. The seed is the most vital source of that sustenance. Sin la semilla, la acequia no tiene destino.
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