The Chile Chronicles: Tales of a New Mexico Harvest
by Carmella PadillaMuseum of New Mexico Press, 119 pp., $29.95 (paper)
Chile is the anchor of traditional Hispanic culture in New Mexico, says Spanish writer Carmella Padilla. For all its hardships, chile farming is a way of life there and a legacy that’s been preserved for centuries. “I made a conscious choice not to make this a cookbook,” she told me last week. “I felt the lifestyle and societal aspects needed to be documented.” So for this book, she followed the chile growing season along the Rio Grande, chronicling the simple lives and histories of 12 farm families. She also recorded the history of chile horticulture and all the ways that chile has become essential to the state’s economy.
This is a torn-jeans book that leaves dirt under your fingernails. Instead of idyllic views of chic picturesque farms and romantic notions of farming, she gives a real look at the hardships of rural life in one of the poorest states in the nation. “Those who see just the trendiness and celebrity of New Mexico miss what’s really beautiful about this state,” Padilla said. Her understandable devotion to the northern Spanish communities of her heritage, and partiality for their chiles, are the only instances in which you’ll encounter indulgent sentimentality.
Mostly, you’ll find a lot of blood, sweat, and tears within these pages, and in the roughened faces of the hard-working people photographed. Its honesty will, for example, dispel any cutesy views some have of the “chile capital” of Hatch when they learn that it’s a tiny, desolate place with more pickup trucks and tractors than people, crime and alcoholism that follow the course of the chile crop, and entertainment that means ladies’ bridge games and burgers at the Dairy Queen.
Chile farmers are nurtured by their faith in nature. One retired chile farmer told Padilla that “You become very spiritual because so much of your life depends on the God-given: the sun, the moon, the wind, the water … Tonight, I’ll pray that everything we saw [in the chile fields] today will still be here tomorrow.”
It often isn’t. New Mexico’s one of the harshest farming environments, although its unique soil and high desert climate are just what chile needs, and the state grows most of the country’s chile. Farmers must contend with droughts, diseases that devastate harvests, political and racial conflicts, labor problems, and severe weather in spring freezes, tornado-force winds, and late-summer monsoon thunderstorms. One day, Jim Lytle of Hatch stood admiring his 300 acres of plump green chiles ready to be picked; 10 minutes later, every single plant was destroyed by an afternoon hailstorm, along with his $650,000 investment.
“I was overcome by what all our chile farmers had to endure to get in their crops,” Padilla said. “After seeing that, we can’t complain about paying $20 for a bag of green chile.”
Even the cracking apart of the book’s binding seems a fitting reinforcement of the brutality of New Mexico’s dry heat and arduous reality of chile farming. — Sandy Szwarc
This article appears in August 23 • 2002.