The Colorado College Bulletin
Teaching the Southwest
The Tomato Ladies, They Teach
The Tomato Ladies, They Teach
A House Made of Straw

The Tomato Ladies, They Teach

By Kitren Fischer '03


Where else but Embudo, N.M. can you awaken to see Buddy Sin Fin, the family goat, standing on the roof of your car, chewing the plastic buttons on the ski rack?


In September, I took Mario Montaño's Anthropology of Food course, in which we traveled to study grassroots farming at Margaret Campos' farm in Embudo. I immediately fell in love with her family and their simple lifestyle. I remember I was standing in the middle of the field, picking ripe green chiles with my classmates, when Mario tugged on my elbow and said, "Hey, why don't you think about living with Margaret and Eremita for a while for your thesis. You could make a cookbook and collect stories. Write a book about them." And I did just that.


My thesis began as two large squares of butcher paper. On the paper, we recorded all the names of extended family members as far back as anyone in Embudo or Las Trampas or El Valle could remember. The family tree alone, I think, did Margaret's family a great service. They began to think about the importance of recording their family history before all of the storytellers pass away. The stories were told to me during my three-week stay in Embudo, some during formal and structured interviews, and some over a pan of green chile enchiladas. The ones that I have chosen to convey are congruent in that they all have something to do with food, either directly or indirectly. I figured food would be an appropriate constant since, as Margaret puts it, "We in New Mexico know people, places, and events by food." The setting for each story is one of several small villages of northern New Mexico, and although the time fluctuates from the early to late 1900s, the players are all Eremita and Margaret's extended family members, and all have their places on one of the two squares of butcher paper. The inspiration for this thesis came from Laura Esquivel's "Between Two Fires," a follow-up to her popular novel, "Like Water for Chocolate." Esquivel begins with a family recipe, and then delves into a memory she has of her favorite tio, or of her mother. I wanted to mimic Esquivel by conveying the inherent connection between food and memory for the Campos family.


My many Southwest literature classes with Susan Scarberry-Garcia made this creative writing project a natural extension of what I had learned about the oral tradition in the classroom. Although this is mainly a literary project, it has an anthropological foundation, since my material came from participant-observation and structured interviews, many of which were conducted in Spanish. It is not a true ethnography, however, since I have added details to the cuentos that have been told to me. These stories come closest to testimonios, which are representative of Latino oral history. The testimonios are inspired by the truth, but augmented by my imagination. Really, I had no choice but to embellish, since the stories that were told to me lacked detail and it was up to me to fill in the gaps. Let the discrepancies inspire each storyteller to write his own history the way it really happened.


Eremita and Margaret grow 38 varieties of tomatoes on their farm. They also grow 27 varieties of eggplant. It was The Santa Fean that first dubbed the mother and daughter team "the Tomato Ladies." Living with the Tomato Ladies was an inestimable experience. Their knowledge of the land is something one could never acquire solely from books. They had so much to teach me, things I couldn't realistically learn in a classroom or library. Before I departed for Embudo, for example, I read John Nichols' "The Milagro Beanfield War." However, the ideals in the novel didn't hit home until I was actually living on the battlefields of Eremita's beanfield war, which began when her neighbors turned her in for illegally watering her small plot of purple and green beans in June 1991. Needless to say, there is a notable difference between reading books about universal struggles for the people of the Southwest and experiencing the struggles firsthand.


I was naïve to think that life in the campesino was a piece of cake. Consequently, the collection of writings as a whole reflects the hard life in these smaller villages, a life very different from the ones I have known. I was blind to the hardships that plague those who live here, those who have lost children in childbirth, those who have battled their neighbors over land for generations, those who couldn't continue with grade school because they had to stay home and wash their siblings' cloth diapers, and those who continue to struggle with the state engineer to keep their water rights. They never struggled to put food on the table, though. Nobody ever goes hungry in New Mexico.


Read more of Fischer's stories from her thesis online at www.ColoradoCollege.edu/Bulletin