A Tortilla Is Like Life: Food and Culture in the San Luis Valley of Colorado

By Carole M. Counihan

An innovative portrait of a small Colorado town based on a decade’s worth of food-centered life histories from nineteen of its female residents.

Located in the southern San Luis Valley of Colorado, the remote and relatively unknown town of Antonito is home to an overwhelmingly Hispanic population struggling not only to exist in an economically depressed and politically marginalized area, but also to preserve their culture and their lifeways. Between 1996 and 2006, anthropologist Carole Counihan collected food-centered life histories from nineteen Mexicanas―Hispanic American women―who had long-standing roots in the Upper Rio Grande region. The interviews in this groundbreaking study focused on southern Colorado Hispanic foodways―beliefs and behaviors surrounding food production, distribution, preparation, and consumption.

In this book, Counihan features extensive excerpts from these interviews to give voice to the women of Antonito and highlight their perspectives. Three lines of inquiry are framed: feminist ethnography, Latino cultural citizenship, and Chicano environmentalism. Counihan documents how Antonito’s Mexicanas establish a sense of place and belonging through their knowledge of land and water and use this knowledge to sustain their families and communities. Women play an important role by gardening, canning, and drying vegetables; earning money to buy food; cooking; and feeding family, friends, and neighbors on ordinary and festive occasions. They use food to solder or break relationships and to express contrasting feelings of harmony and generosity, or enmity and envy. The interviews in this book reveal that these Mexicanas are resourceful providers whose food work contributes to cultural survival.

“An important contribution to Mexican American culture.” ―Oral History Review

“Counihan’s book is well written and will appeal to a wide spectrum of readers . . . I would recommend this book to those whose interests lie in foodways, gender studies, ethnography and folklore. A Tortilla is Like Life would be a good addition to any reading list, and a beneficial resource for those who desire to understand the complex associations of gender, food, culture and ethnicity.” —Digest: A Journal of Foodways and Culture

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jan 1, 2010
• ISBN: 9780292782440

Book preview

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

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First edition, 2009

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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

Institutional E-book ISBN: 978-0-292-79518-1

Individual E-book ISBN: 9780292795181

A Tortilla

Is Like

Life

Food and Culture in the

San Luis Valley of Colorado

CAROLE M. COUNIHAN

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.

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.

CONTENTS

Cover

Copyright

Preface

Acknowledgments

CHAPTER 1

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

CHAPTER 2

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

CHAPTER 3

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

CHAPTER 4

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

CHAPTER 5

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

CHAPTER 6

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

CHAPTER 7

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

CHAPTER 8

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

CHAPTER 9

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

CHAPTER 10

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

CHAPTER 11

Conclusion: Our People Will Survive

The Fourth of July Meal

Unpacking the Fourth of July Meal

Explanations for the Antonito Diet

Toward the Future

APPENDIX 1

Topics in Food-Centered Life Histories

APPENDIX 2

Categories of Analysis

APPENDIX 3

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

APPENDIX 4

Wild Plants Used for Food or Healing in the Antonito Area

Notes

Glossary of Spanish Terms

Bibliography

Index

PREFACE

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.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

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.

A TORTILLA IS LIKE LIFE

1

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 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.

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

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.

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 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 Colorado.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 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.

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