New Mexico No. 9 – a food folklorico
By Hakim Bellamy
commissioned for the Santa Fe Farmers’ Market Institute, presented at the 2019 Fall Fiesta
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My gut tells me
we are at least 2500 years old.
Our maiden crop
at least 5 grand and a mile high.
In the beginning
Back before we were basket makers
and Mogollon.
Long before we turned water into borders
to separate,
we trapped it in terraces and trenches
to toil us together.
But sometime before that,
back when we were “Aztec” and didn’t know it.
When we were standing on an Empire,
that no one told us….
We invented corn.
Corn didn’t come in drums,
it came in ears.
It came in the sound of God
like she could hear our hunger.
Because all corn is
is the son,
batterized into a photovoltaic cell.
A solar platter or plot in a meal…
soul food, S.O.L. on a plate…
until we are out of luck
…lucky.
No wonder we fancied ourselves
children of this stalk.
So tall like a father
it figures our crops
would eventually climb circles
’round smoke signals.
Kissing, cooing & S.O.S.ing heaven’s water
to break.
Flood fertilizer and impregnate
the “other” Amazon going up in flames inside of us.
In the age of acequia
we witnessed an irrigation revival.
Bout the time Juan de Oñate showed up
with all his bull.
We had beef.
We had hogs.
We had horse.
We had sheep.
We had enough milk and meat
to make up a bison’s share of our future commodities.
And as we began
to cultivate that delicate dance between
extinction and evolving…
taking versus bartering…
We became more and more intoxicated
with the conventional wisdom of man…
instead of the perpetual wisdom of the land.
Our querencia.*
Farming is the original scientific method,
got those Dr. Fabian Garcia genetics.
We are an alchemy of varietals braided together
from the market to the vineyard.
The kind of knowledge
only yielded
from trial and error.
An agricultural revolution
you can set a sun dial to.
Long having refunded an abstract salary for sustenance,
instead trade currency for culture.
The real brainiacs of this planet.
Big campesino on campus.
Learned from great grandparents how to cut out “the man” in the middle
when the average family spends 60% of their income
on what they eat.
Pretty good for a sharecropper,
better known as geniuses of math and astro-climatology…
But it ain’t all science,
this is equal parts theology.
Like any good meal…
For centuries made a ritual of pairing
food with music, dance and art.
The repass, the after church brunch, the Potter and all the pottered pots,
the altar drowning in cornucopia, the communion cups,
the corn meal that kept us grounded
in prayer. A blessing.
As human beings,
we are fortunate enough to find ourselves in a perpetual season of growth.
Sometimes flourishing,
unafraid of the ultimate harvest.
But sentient enough to avoid any decisions
that would arrive us there sooner.
We became
whole civilizations with impressive architecture
so futuristic it emerged from and dissolved into the soil
in harmony with the crops whose dirt it shared.
We were earth cities before earth ships then, and we can do it again.
We are doing it again.
Garden by garment.
Barn by farm.
We were people of the plaza,
of the market long before we became people of the malls.
Bio-Engineering our rights
and our wrongs.
Growing an Eden of each other.
Part Economy,
part Ecosystem,
part labor…
all love.
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*querencia, as defined by Juan Estevan Arellano, is “that sense of place defined by the texture of biting into a recently plucked green chile, the smell of tortillas cooking over a piñon fire on my grandmother’s old wooden stove, the color of a ripe tomato waiting to be sliced.”
© Hakim Bellamy October 4, 2019
The image is from the award-winning Dreaming New Mexico program, an innovative Bioneers program to bring about restorative ecological and social transformation both at the local and regional level of our Southwestern home base and as a template and tool kit for other place-based initiatives. Using collaborative and systemic approaches, the program seeks pragmatic and visionary solutions that heal the harms done to our state’s air, waters and lands, as well as to the spirit, livelihood and health of our diverse peoples.