Fruit, Fiber, and Fire by William R. Carleton

Author:William R. Carleton [Carleton, William R.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf

Part 3

Chile

5

Crossing Chiles, Crossing Borders

Dr. Fabián García, the New Mexican Chile Pepper, and Modernity in the Early Twentieth-Century U.S.-Mexico Borderlands

New Mexico’s official state question—“Red or green?”—inquires tongue-in-cheek about chile preference to celebrate one of the state’s leading crops and economic engines. Implicitly the question also signals pride for New Mexico’s Hispanic and Native cultural heritage. This official display of pride came roughly a century after New Mexican politicians and other territorial elites debated, in explicitly racist terms, whether New Mexico was modern and white enough to become fully incorporated into the union.1 As these elites sought to distance New Mexico’s population from its indigenous heritage and its neighbors to the south, a Mexican-born horticulturalist at New Mexico’s land-grant college, Dr. Fabián García, bred a new chile variety that embodied an alternative vision of modernity for New Mexico. The new chile pepper encouraged a more industrialized, more culturally inclusive borderlands and set the course for an industry that would eventually define the state’s cultural identity.

García held an important position as a cultural and agricultural intermediary that shaped his work with the iconic chile. As horticulturalist at the New Mexico College of Agriculture and Mechanic Arts (NMAM), later New Mexico State University (NMSU), in Las Cruces, New Mexico—positioned more squarely in the borderlands than any other land-grant college in the United States—García helped disseminate cultural and agricultural change in all directions in early twentieth-century New Mexico. The number 9 chile, as García called the new variety, was more than simply the first scientific and industrial chile pepper; it embodied a pan-Hispanic and nationally inclusive vision for New Mexico that encouraged cultural transformations both within and beyond the borderlands. García’s efforts transformed more than the chile’s genetics; his efforts represented the first major step in producing a modern crop that the nation as a whole could more readily consume. Perhaps better than any other single crop variety, the number 9 chile reveals the intersections among modernity, race, and nation within the wider economic and cultural network of the early twentieth-century U.S.-Mexico borderlands.

García was “born of humble parents” in 1871 in Chihuahua, Chihuahua. Two years after his parents died, his grandmother brought him to the mountains of southern New Mexico, where as a boy he recalled being terrified by encounters with Apaches. His grandmother eventually landed a job in Las Cruces with the prominent Casad family, who treated him “as a member of the family, in all respects,” sending him to grade school and then NMAM, which they had helped found. García became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1889, graduated from NMAM’s inaugural class of 1894, and shortly thereafter joined the faculty as a horticultural assistant. He worked on a wide range of projects at the college (particularly with fruit trees), spent a year doing graduate work at Cornell University in 1899–1900, and in 1907 married Julieta Amador, whose family had deep-rooted business and social connections with Mexico. His disparate experiences and connections from an early age cut across cultural, class, and geopolitical lines.2

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