|
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
1
| 2 |