A Tortilla Is Like Life

Food and Culture in the San Luis Valley of Colorado

Carole M. Counihan

• Publisher: University of Texas Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9780292723108
• eBook ISBN: 9780292782440
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

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

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 recorde...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1 “I Did Do Something”: Food-Centered Life Histories in Antonito, Colorado
• Chapter 2 “The Stereotypes Have to Be Broken”: Identity and Ethnicity in Antonito
• Chapter 3 “Part of This World”: Meanings of Land and Water
• Chapter 4 “Anything You Want Is Going to Come from the Earth”: The Traditional Diet
• Chapter 5 “We’ve Got to Provide for the Family”: Women, Food, and Work
• Chapter 6 “It’s a Feeling Thing”: Cooking and Women’s Agency
• Chapter 7 “Meals Are Important, Maybe It’s Love”: Mexicano Meals and Family
• Chapter 8 “It Was a Give-and-Take”: Sharing and Generosity versus Greed and Envy
• Chapter 9 “Come Out of Your Grief”: Death and Commensality
• Chapter 10 “Give Because It Multiplies”: Hunger and Response in Antonito
• Chapter 11 Conclusion: “Our People Will Survive”
• 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