Fruit, Fiber, and Fire: A History of Modern Agriculture in New Mexico

Abstract

In Fruit, Fiber, and Fire, William Carleton explores the interconnectedness of industrial production, environment, labor, and identity in the making of New Mexico's modern agricultural landscapes. The author's work is transnational in nature, weaving together a borderlands synthesis of how plants, migrant labor, and commercial agricultural practices ebbed and flowed across a permeable southwestern border. This study, divided into three thematic sections each comprising two chapters, investigates the successive development of New Mexico's commercial apple, cotton, and chili pepper industries between 1870 and 2000. Carleton crafts a multidisciplinary narrative that does an uncommonly fine job of cautioning the reader to avoid viewing modernity as unwaveringly linear, while positioning commercial agriculture in New Mexico at the center of important questions concerning settler colonialism, ecological imperialism, and the making of modern identity in the southwestern borderlands.Supported by outside capital, settler colonialism, and local Hispanic and Native American labor, apple orchards flourished for a time in the Pecos and San Juan valleys, creating an irrigated Eden for white settlement. The codling moth, soil salinization, and market competition stymied commercial orcharding prior to World War II but not the significance of the apple in shaping New Mexico's cultural landscapes. Protecting the old Spanish orchard in Manzano, New Mexico, for tourism also reinforced the public perception of the superiority of modern American agricultural production over older Hispanic agricultural landscapes, while James Young's invention of the Champagne apple perpetuated American myths of the white yeoman farmer. During the 1960s, as orchard production shifted to Hispanic and Native American districts in northern New Mexico, the author elucidates how apple cooperatives became centers of conflict over culture, labor, government policy, and differing conceptions of local sustainable agricultural production.By the 1920s cotton replaced orchards and alfalfa in New Mexico's irrigated valleys, bringing unprecedented environmental and demographic change and new collaboration between universities, state agencies, and agriculture in the region. An influx of white southerners brought cultural nostalgia for the Old South, farm tenancy or sharecropping, and a monocrop agricultural regime dependent upon migrant labor from Mexico, the South, and the southern plains. Cotton farming, made possible by the introduction of Acala cotton found on diversified farms in Mexico, was commercialized north of the border and then reintroduced into Mexico, where it eventually displaced traditional farming. Carleton, however, devotes an entire chapter to Stahmann Farms, which incorporated crop diversification and company paternalism to become one of New Mexico's most successful agricultural enterprises between 1926 and 1970. This chapter supports one of the author's main arguments that modern agricultural regimes often borrowed heavily from the past.Over the first half of the twentieth century, Dr. Fabián García transformed the chili pepper from a regional crop to one of national significance. García, director of the agricultural experiment station at the New Mexico College of Agriculture and Mechanic Arts, developed the number 9, a chili bred from older local Hispanic varieties traditionally planted for home use but with a skin more amenable to the canning industry. As a result, he created a pepper that “crossed geopolitical, seasonal, and cultural borders” (136). After World War II, state boosters endeavored to make the chile pepper culturally New Mexican in origin by backdating García's work to the 1890s and downplaying the significance of Mexican varieties in the development of the original number 9. Animosity developed between industrial and native or local growers in New Mexico as the chile pepper gained national recognition and the state began to intervene to control how chiles were marketed by the early 2000s.Carleton's study presents the reader with an excellent history of how the interconnections of national markets, local environmental conditions, plants, labor, and universities or government agencies shaped the industrial agricultural landscapes of modern New Mexico. More significantly, the author integrates these themes within broader discussions of race and cultural identity in the southwestern borderlands. Carleton's study reminds us that while modern industrial agricultural regimes often obfuscate older traditional agricultural practices, it is often predicated upon the appropriation of seeds, labor, and knowledge from the landscapes it erases. In Fruit, Fiber, and Fire, the author finds that industrial agricultural in New Mexico does not take a linear trajectory toward ever increasing yields and efficiency but instead borrows heavily from the past, while at the same time creating new myths and reimagining old stories about the people who worked the land.