2/13 Activity
a chill guy
1RenewalTesuquePuebloNM.pdf
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r e n e w a l
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Four Sisters Garden and
Monte Vista Farm
t e s u q u e p u e b l o a n d e s p a ñ o l a , n e w m e x i c o
Tesuque Pueblo
At first the dogs don’t see me. They wrestle and nip at each other,
take off across the empty plaza, tumble in a heap, and come up
covered with dust. Then they lie down panting, only to begin the
game over again in a minute or two. When they do find me, sit-
ting on Clayton Brascoupé’s back porch wondering where every-
one is, they spring up and race over, pummeling me with dusty
paws, licking my face, crowding into my lap to sniff my clothes,
my neck, my hair. As fast as they came in a happy, yelping
clamor, they grow bored and run away again. I stand up and dust
myself off. Did anyone see that? Only one placid dog lying in a
nearby doorway surveys me with a calm regard.
Except for the dogs, I am alone in the chill of a desert morning
in the plaza of Tesuque Pueblo, the smallest and one of the most
traditional of the nine Pueblo communities east of the Rio
Grande in northern New Mexico. The sun is about to come up
over the mountains. Sangre de Cristo, the Spanish named them—
Blood of Christ—for the red-gold stain on their flanks at sunset,
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not for the blood the conquistadors spilled when they came north
from New Spain in the sixteenth century, searching for Cibolá,
one of the fabled cities of gold.
Ten miles north of Santa Fe, I find myself in another world,
where the connected adobe dwellings, like the earth of the bare
plaza, are the color of cocoa. There is nothing here to accommo-
date me, the stranger. The plaza is the inside, the center, of a dis-
tinct world. It offers none of the visual cues of mainstream
America to help me orient myself—no streets lined with wood-
framed houses, no green lawns, no asphalt driveways, no ga-
rages, and no conventional landscaping. Here, land is not private
but communally owned. Here, to garden is to continue one of the
oldest forms of cultivation in America. Here, where the sun is
about to light up the cross on the adobe church in the northeast
corner of the plaza, members of each of Tesuque’s two moieties,
Summer and Winter, perform the ancient dances—the Corn
Dance in June, the Bear Dance in November.
As I slap the dust off my pants, I wonder how I’m going to find
Clayton. A Mohawk married to a Tewa woman of the pueblo,
Clayton Brascoupé has lived at Tesuque Pueblo since the 1970s.
He is now the director of the Traditional Native American Farm-
ers Association, an intertribal group devoted to helping Native
growers of the Southwest maintain and pass on their traditional
crops, land, and way of life. We were to meet so I could see Four
Sisters Garden, the Brascoupé family’s garden.
While I ponder my situation, I study the tall stalks of corn
Clayton has planted just outside his door. Tendrils of bean vines
climb them to reach the sun, while the thick, hairy leaves of
squash plants cover the ground at their feet. The earth is so hard
and dry, it seems impossible that this traditional interplanting of
the “Three Sisters,” a reflection of Clayton’s Iroquois ancestry,
should grow at all. But that’s the point of my having come here—
to see how the Tewa, like the Zuni and the Hopi, are blending in-
digenous traditions of planting the high desert with innovative
ideas from leaders in sustainable agriculture.
p a t r i c i a k l i n d i e n s t
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Indian gardening and farming have suffered a decline. Native
Americans of the Southwest are so intimately linked to the foods
their ancestors ate millennia ago that once they adopted a
mainstream American diet, as they have in recent decades, they
suffered an epidemic of adult-onset diabetes. To become self-
sufficient again on the harsh land of the high desert of northern
New Mexico, where Pueblo Indians have farmed and gardened
for nearly a thousand years, is to restore both the people and
their land to health.
Clayton’s corn is a sign of his lineage and links him to his
wife’s people as well. Iroquois white corn came east with the Al-
gonkin peoples from whom they are descended a millennium
ago. And in Tewa, the language of Margaret Brascoupé’s people,
the word for food, translated literally, means “white corn meal.”
For the Iroquois as well as the Tewa, corn is the mother of the
people.
For the Europeans who came to conquer them, it had a differ-
ent meaning entirely. When Coronado led his expedition north
from New Spain in 1540, the sun glinting off his breastplate
etched with an image of the Virgin Mother of God, he found
no fabulous cities. What the conquistadors found instead was
“something we prized much more than gold or silver,” as one of
the tired and hungry soldiers recorded—Zuni gardens full of
“plentiful maize and beans,” and domesticated turkeys “larger
than those in New Spain.” The European invaders demanded the
food, without which they would have starved, as “tribute”—one
of the many rituals of subjugation the young and arrogant Coro-
nado imposed.
In 1680, angry with the violent suppression of their religion
and with the demands for tribute, the Tewa people of Tesuque
Pueblo, led by a man named Popé, rose up to drive the Spanish
conquerors from their homeland. After setting fire to the church
in the plaza, the warriors of Tesuque joined seven thousand other
Pueblo Indians as they moved toward Santa Fe, eight miles to the
south, destroying colonial settlements and killing missionary
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priests along the way. When word of their approach reached the
city, the bell in the small adobe church of San Miguel rang out in
warning.
For nine days the Indians encircled the city, cutting off the wa-
ter supply. On the tenth day, the Spanish survivors fled, taking
with them the small figure of La Conquistadora, the Virgin
dressed as a Spanish queen which the Franciscan superior of the
missions had brought with him when he came to New Mexico in
1625.
The Spanish left behind a land and a people changed by their
coming. Horses, sheep, cows, and pigs, grazing animals Native
Americans had never seen before, had transformed their tradi-
tional agriculture, as had the thousand irrigation ditches they
had been forced to dig when pressed into slave labor. These
ditches, called acequias, and the introduction of metal tools made it possible to cultivate the fruit trees the Spanish intro-
duced—peaches, apples, cherries, pears, grapes, and apricots
—and foreign vegetables like asparagus and lettuce, and the
chilies brought by the Mexican Indians who traveled with the
Spanish.
Following the Pueblo rebellion, Popé— one of eleven men
who had been whipped before his own people by a Franciscan
who had punished him for practicing his native religion—trav-
eled from pueblo to pueblo, urging the people to “burn the seeds
which the Spaniards sowed.” He exhorted them to return to
planting “only maize and beans,” the crops of their ancestors.
The practice of Christianity and the use of the Spanish lan-
guage—including their baptismal names—were to be expunged.
But there could be no simple return. The people, and their
land, had been changed by 150 years of contact.
Two gardens, one at Tesuque Pueblo and the other forty min-
utes north, in the Española Valley, reflect the ironies of conquest
and mutual adaptation as the descendants of both the Pueblo In-
dians and the Spanish colonials renew their ties to the land.
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“Any garden to me is sacred,” Clayton Brascoupé explains as
we sit in his office. The stuffed head of a javelina he killed with a
traditional bow and arrow is mounted on the wall behind him.
His braids hang well below his shoulders. He speaks slowly and
thoughtfully and will not be hurried.
“Most of the villages here have been farming the same place
for eight hundred to a thousand years,” he says. “When I talk to
older farmers or gardeners, I hear that the land speaks to them.
And they speak to the land. They’ll describe what the land is
telling them—what should be planted here, what shouldn’t be
planted, if the land should be left alone—they learn all those
things just from walking around.”
The elders read weeds, indicator species that “tell you what
nutrients are there, what isn’t there, what should be there,” as
Clayton puts it. “I’ve seen farmers pick up soil, smell the soil,
taste the soil,” he says. “It’s a way of communicating. It’s a way
of reading the soil and speaking to the land. The older farmers
I’ve worked with knew all of that. They had years and years and
years of experience practicing it, and the knowledge that was
handed down to them orally from their elders. All that could be
lost in one generation.”
As much to himself as to me, Clayton adds, “They will find
people in their communities to pass it on to. They will.”
Clayton uses the words listen, speak, communicate, and com- munity again and again as he tells me about the movement to restore traditional Native American gardening to Pueblo com-
munities before the wisdom of the remaining elders is lost.
He has been gardening since he was a boy. “I grew up in a
community called Tuscarora Indian Reservation, in western New
York, outside of Niagara Falls. I’m a Mohawk.”
The Iroquois Confederacy originally included five peoples:
the Oneida, Seneca, Mohawk, Onondaga, and Cayuga. There
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are now Six Nations in the confederacy, with the addition of the
Tuscarora of South Carolina.
“My mom and dad, my brothers and sisters, the occasional
cousin, all lived in a very small home. Our grandmother had a
big influence on our lives, on me. Anthropologists like to say that
the Iroquois are matriarchal, you know—that women are a lead-
ing factor socially. Our grandmother wielded a lot of authority in
the home.” Her name was Sarah Doctor, and Clayton remembers
her as a source of wisdom.
The intergenerational household Sarah Doctor presided over
reflects the legacy of communal life in the Iroquois long house.
“Materially, she didn’t have a lot. Back in the early fifties, I think
people outside of our communities probably would have consid-
ered our nation poor, they would have seen us as living in pov-
erty. But I never felt that. We didn’t have a lot, but we were loved.
It was all there. Everything that we needed was there.
“My grandmother spoke Mohawk, Cayuga, Tuscarora, and
English. The smaller we were, the more we were able to under-
stand.” Clayton remembers his aunts and uncles telling him sto-
ries that explained why these languages were not passed on.
“There were whippings in school. Children were tied to immov-
able objects in dark closets. My parents discouraged us from
speaking the languages to protect us. There was a stigma to eat-
ing our own food, so we ate one kind of food at home and
another at school. I think that’s why a lot of people kept their
gardens—they could have the food they wanted. Gardens were
safe—gardens weren’t scrutinized.
“As we got a little older, we began to see social dividing lines.
We were being persuaded to become more ‘American,’ whatever
that means. I guess we were to give up our identity as humans.”
Members of the Six Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy call
themselves Onkwehonweh, the Real or Pure People. Though
their lands cross two national borders, they do not refer to them-
selves as American or Canadian.
“The garden was a way of preserving our identity. Especially
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if the garden contained the seeds that were given to us by our el-
ders. It meant we kept that relationship to the earth.” The garden
became a form of resistance to assimilation.
“The original garden is in the Iroquois story of how the earth
was created,” Clayton explains. “The Iroquois didn’t actually
make the world,” he adds, pausing to laugh, “although some of them think they did—and we do claim a lot of things—but that’s
not one of them. The original garden was actually a grave. You
know, it was dug deep. Instead of seeds being planted in this gar-
den, it was the body of one of our original mothers.
“The grave wasn’t one that you would envision today, where
a person would be laid out horizontally. In the past our people
were buried as we are found in our mother, curled up in a ball. So
the original garden wasn’t rectangular, it was circular, and from
it emerged these plants, this array. Out of this grave a garden
emerged, our plants,” Clayton says—the corn, beans, and squash
traditionally cultivated by women and the tobacco used in cere-
monies, which was planted and tended by men. “Today they call
it intercropping. I’d never seen it, ever, when I was growing up.
People knew about it, people talked about it, people referred to
the story, but I never saw one person do it.” The story, but not
the practice, of the traditional Iroquois garden had endured.
“I was born in 1951, when gardens and farming were com-
monplace. If you didn’t have a garden, you didn’t eat as well. A
lot of people were still making what you would consider a living
by farming. Some had cows. Some had chickens, some had pigs.
Not everybody had all of those things. But it was a farming com-
munity, so you didn’t need to—you could barter for whatever
you needed. We grew potatoes, tomatoes, and cucumbers. Some
corn, but not a lot.”
Clayton was about nine years old when he started working
the land. “I started working on commercial farms at the age of
thirteen,” he says—potato farms, chicken farms, farms that grew
only tobacco, and vineyards, where he learned how to prune and
how to keep a greenhouse. “I worked on commercial farms and I
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worked on Native American family subsistence farms. And I be-
gan to see a difference.
“There was one Native American farmer in particular that I
worked with who really inspired me. His name was Mike Boots.
He’s passed away now. He had a place on Akwesasne,” the Mo-
hawk name for a small reservation on an island in the St. Law-
rence River. “The Mohawk territories straddle New York on the
United States side and Ontario and Quebec on the Canadian
side,” Clayton explains. “There’s a pretty good-sized island in
the middle of the St. Lawrence called Cornwall Island, with two
bridges, one connecting to the Canadian side, one to the States
side. Mike Boots was dedicated to his very large garden on the
island.” It was Boots’s love of the land as much as his skill that
made this the place where Clayton too learned to love working
the land.
“I used to walk quite a ways to get there before seven o’clock
in the morning. It was so peaceful,” Clayton says, “so calm. We
worked hard all day. I enjoyed that. We got dirty,” he adds, smil-
ing. “And that was enjoyable too. I tell people now, ‘You know,
when you farm, your hands are dirty at the end of the day, but
your hands are clean.’ With organic farming, the ethic it takes to
maintain that type of farm, there’s an integrity to that. So your
hands are clean. You haven’t poisoned the water, you haven’t
poisoned the food chain. You haven’t maliciously hurt birds or
insects.”
But Clayton didn’t learn that on commercial farms. “I was
exposed to pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, all of those things
working commercial farms,” he says. “I have residues from those
days in my body yet.
“The messages that were coming to me and all the younger
people in the Iroquois communities in western New York were
that we needed to continue to farm. We needed to continue to
plant our old, traditional varieties of the corns, the beans, the
squashes. Oral traditions passed down in Iroquois communities,
and also in my wife’s community, the Pueblo communities, told
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us that we should be doing these things. Back in the fifties, the el-
ders were saying that we had to protect our fields. They said that
we should not get involved in chemical agriculture, the spraying
of pesticides and so on.
“I listened really carefully, and I began to understand what
they were telling us. If we eat this diet that was described in oral
tradition telling how this land was created, how the spirit of the
earth—her being— came with the corns, beans, and squash,
we’re eating a balanced diet. And if we plant these things in the
prescribed manner, we are also taking care of the land, our first
mother.”
Clayton was introduced to the Iroquois way of gardening just
as Cornwall Island came under assault, not from a nation intent
on colonizing this time, but by national and transnational corpo-
rations. “Since I left, Akwesasne has suffered horrendous ecolog-
ical problems. They’re out of dairy farming now because of air
pollutants that fell on the grass. The cows would eat the grass
and die.”
Peter Matthiessen devoted a chapter of Indian Country to the destruction of Akwesasne and the violence that almost engulfed
the Iroquois Nation in its standoff with the State of New York
when the Native Americans tried to defend their land. Beginning
in the fifties, with the building of the Moses-Saunders Power
Dam on the St. Lawrence River, which generated cheap hydro-
electric power, corporations began locating heavy industry on or
near Iroquois land. Reynolds Metals, General Motors, Alcoa,
and Domtar pulp mill (a division of Reed International) began to
release toxic waste, poisoning the water, the air, the ground—
and the Iroquois people. It was ash and fluoride from the Rey-
nolds Metal plant that poisoned the cows. As the cattle ate grass
coated with ash, they began to grind down their own teeth. As
toxins entered their bloodstream, their bones weakened. They
began to starve.
“In 1959, when Reynolds began its operation,” Matthiessen
wrote, “there were five times as many cow barns on Cornwall Is-
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land as there are now: the Indians say that the starving cattle, dis-
abled by bone afflictions, lay down to graze, and crawled from
one place to another” before they died. The fish began to disap-
pear and the bees vanished entirely as wild game and gardening
declined and conifer forests began to die.
Clayton left Akwesasne just before the ravages of industrial
pollution destroyed Mike Boots’s land. He began traveling
across the country, from one Indian community to another. This
was when his real education began, his apprenticeship on the
land.
“I visited other Native communities. I started looking at other
ways of doing agriculture. I made myself available as a farm-
hand. Then I moved out West, and I did the same thing, because
I didn’t know much about the type of farming that’s being prac-
ticed out here.” Then he met Margaret.
“I made myself available to my father-in-law and to some
of my wife’s uncles. When we started, there was only a handful
of elderly men still gardening at Tesuque. Margaret was eighteen
and I was twenty-one. This was in 1974.”
The radical spirit of the early 1960s, including the revolution
in race relations achieved by the civil rights movement, awak-
ened in ethnic peoples across America a fierce new awareness of
their right to retain their cultural heritage, whether in religious
ceremonies, language, dress, or food. By the early 1970s, as pub-
lic awareness of the dangers of industrial agriculture increased,
organic gardening was enjoying a great resurgence. People once
again became interested in growing their own food. The peace
movement that helped end the war in Vietnam in 1975 intro-
duced a generation to the politics of engagement and inspired the
rewriting of our national myths of origin.
The Native American rights movement of the 1970s and
1980s, which included tragic episodes of repressive violence,
was a part of this extraordinary resurgence of the democratic
impulse. And when Clayton Brascoupé began to encounter rep-
resentatives of the new environmental ethic—people who under-
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stood that agricultural restoration had to include cultural
restoration as well—the tiny community of Tesuque Pueblo, with
its eight hundred inhabitants, was linked to an international
movement that affirms rather than denies the wisdom of ancient
traditions.
“There’s an elder Japanese farmer, Masanobu Fukuoka, who
wrote this book called The One-Straw Revolution,” Clayton says as he hands me a well-worn paperback he found on a
bookrack in a train station. The title, derived from the saying of
a Japanese elder—“Treat every piece of straw as precious and
never waste a step”—intrigued him. One straw, Fukuoka saw—
one straw at a time—could bring about a revolution. Live in re-
lation to the land this way, and many things will change.
Fukuoka’s ideas startled Clayton. They resonated with every-
thing he had heard growing up with Mohawk elders in western
New York. Clayton takes the book back and begins to read aloud
from Wendell Berry’s introduction. “‘We cannot separate one as-
pect of life from another. When we change the way we grow our
food, we change our food. And when we change— or lose—
our food,’” Clayton continues, looking up at me, then down at
the page again, “‘we change society, we change our values.’”
At the close of World War II, Masanobu Fukuoka retreated to
a mountain, giving up his position as a plant pathologist in Yoka-
hama. He left the lab to return to the land, where he invented
a form of no-till agriculture that enriched the soil and produced
staggering yields with less labor and less water than conventional
methods of rice cultivation. “The ultimate goal of farming,”
Fukuoka teaches, “is not the growing of crops, but the cultiva-
tion and perfection of human beings.”
The spiritual dimension of Fukuoka’s practice was in har-
mony with the stories Clayton had heard from his elders.
In 1992, when the founders of Native Seeds/SEARCH, an or-
ganization devoted to the collection, preservation, and distri-
bution of heirloom seeds of Native American foods, sponsored
a conference on traditional Native American farming in Gallup,
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New Mexico, they hoped to address the collective crisis facing
Indians of the Southwest. Forty-three Native American farmers,
some in their teens, some in their eighties, came with their fami-
lies to talk about the loss of their agricultural traditions, the
degradation of their environment, and the weakening of family
and community ties that seemed to go with them. It was there
that the Traditional Native American Farmers Association,
TNAFA, was formed. Clayton was chosen to be its first director.
“Traditional Native American agriculture can mean a lot of
things to a lot of people,” Clayton explains. “Some people will
describe it as planting the old varieties of corn, but behind a
horse and plow.” But both the horse and the metal plow arrived
with Coronado and the conquistadors. “That’s their version of
traditional agriculture, their own mindset,” Clayton says. “There
are other techniques that have arisen recently. They’re not new
forms of agriculture, but old forms being reexamined.
“I’ve taken some workshops with John Jeavons. He’s with
a group called Ecology Action, out in Willits, California. He’s a
wonderful person. He’s an advocate of double-digging and bio-
intensive agriculture. They’ve taught this method throughout the
world successfully.”
At their experimental farm in Willits and through their seed
catalogue, “Bountiful Gardens,” Jeavons and his small crew at
Ecology Action are having a profound effect on the lives of the
rural poor in every part of the world. “How can we revitalize our
extraordinary planet, ensuring life and health for the environ-
ment, the life-forms of a myriad of ecosystems, humankind, and
future generations?” Jeavons writes in the opening of his classic
how-to manual, How to Grow More Vegetables. “The answer is as close to each of us as the food we consume each day,” he
teaches. “We farm as we eat.”
As Jeavons explained his method during a workshop, Clayton
says, “I realized that he was outlining the oral tradition I’d heard
when I was younger.” Jeavons’s method, modeled on the four-
thousand-year-old Chinese tradition of sustainable agriculture,
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begins with deep soil preparation, or double-digging, after which
you cultivate only the top two inches of the soil. The method in-
cludes the use of compost to nourish the soil; closely spaced
planting, mimicking nature, to preserve moisture and suppress
weed growth; and the interplanting of crops whose nutritional
needs complement one another—like the traditional Iroquois
planting of corn with beans, a legume that fixes nitrogen and so
returns nutrients to the soil, and squash, whose ground-hugging
vines and leaves both cool the soil and help it retain moisture.
Jeavons’s is a system of miniaturization, especially useful for
people with small plots of land. Once established, the biointen-
sive method of gardening actually restores the soil as much as
sixty times faster than nature does. By comparison, industrial
agriculture destroys topsoil eighty times faster than nature can
replace it. Biointensive gardening leads to less water consump-
tion—conserving the most precious of natural resources in the
desert—and a greater yield relative to the area under cultivation.
In many ways it is, as Clayton says, close kin to traditional Na-
tive American gardening.
Clayton made a similar discovery of shared values in the mid-
1980s, when Bill Mollison, the Australian who introduced per-
maculture to the world, came to Santa Fe to do a workshop. “A
couple of Anglos kept saying, ‘Oh, you’ve got to go see Bill Mol-
lison.’ I told them I might. You know, a lot of times people come
to our communities from outside with ‘the answer.’ So in a polite
way I was being evasive, hoping they’d leave me alone.”
But the eager Anglos didn’t go away—they arranged for Clay-
ton to get a scholarship. When he heard this, he figured he’d
show up, listen to a little bit of the morning program, get a nice
lunch, and leave. “I ended up staying all day and going back the
next day as well.”
“Permaculture,” Mollison explains in his Introduction to Per- maculture, “is a design system for creating sustainable human environments. The word itself is a contraction not only of per-
manent agriculture but also of permanent culture, as cultures
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cannot survive for long without a sustainable agricultural base
and land use ethic. On one level, permaculture deals with plants,
animals, buildings, and infrastructures (water, energy, communi-
cations). However, permaculture is not just about these elements,
but rather about the relationships we can create between them by
the way we place them in the landscape.”
Mollison’s ideas echoed those of one of Clayton’s most
influential teachers. “One of the elders that influenced me was a
gentleman who’s passed away now. His name was Philip Deer—
he was a Creek out in Oklahoma. He taught me that if we learn
to listen to our mother, we can also listen to the elements—like
the winds—and the winds can talk to us and teach us things. The
water can do the same thing. The stars. The moon. We just have
to be able to learn.
“I had the greatest respect for him. He lived the words that he
spoke, Philip. This is what our people did. They studied nature,
they learned how to listen. Nature was their university. I thought,
if Bill Mollison from Australia was this close to Philip’s teaching,
then there’s got to be something valid here. As a people, we have
to relearn how to work with the natural elements, natural forces,
in order for human beings to survive. Philip had said this.
“Bill Mollison was saying what I heard coming out of our
own communities. I thought about it for a very long time. It still
seemed like something from outside. But the more I studied it,
the more I saw that the concepts had been instilled in our com-
munities from generations back. Permaculture was already a part
of our communities. So I based my teaching on this.”
Every summer for the past ten years, Clayton has taught a
course called “Traditional Agriculture/Permaculture Design:
Indigenous Solutions for a Sustainable Future.” “We use Molli-
son’s syllabus, but we teach from a knowledge base of our own
communities,” he says. “Newer technologies, like solar power, fit
within our philosophy. The Hopi and Navajo have also adapted
permaculture to their communities. It’s all about sustainable cul-
ture and communities. So we’re looking at what a lot of other
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people are doing and integrating what works with our land and
our communities and our people.”
Someone knocks on Clayton’s door. The interruption makes
us realize that we have talked so long that we must leave right
now if we are going to see the gardens at the pueblo before sun-
down.
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The community’s gardens have been planted on a large shelf of
land between the Tesuque River and the highway that divides the
flatlands from the hills. As we walk down to the Brascoupés’ gar-
den, I notice that there are no signs or fences, no visible dividing
lines among the gardens, though everyone knows whose field is
whose. The land here belongs to everyone, and will be passed
down to everyone who comes after them.
“We have a family-size garden,” Clayton explains. Four Sis-
ters Garden covers about two acres. It is named in honor of Clay-
ton and Margaret’s four daughters: Winona, who is named for
blue corn; Peen Tsawa, whose name means “blue mountain”;
Phoye, which means “yellow autumn”; and Povi, which means
“flower.” The six of them and one son-in-law share the garden.
“All of my kids garden and save seeds,” Clayton says, obvi-
ously pleased. They plant their garden using traditional digging
sticks, or dibbles. Three teams of two can plant two acres in half
a day. They walk side by side, one opening a hole with the dibble,
the other dropping in the seeds, then covering them with soil.
The open-pollinated, heirloom varieties of seeds come from
Native Seeds/SEARCH, which distributes them free to Native
American growers. “They provide the palette,” Clayton says,
“and we, the farmers, we’re the artists. We paint the land.”
Though they always grow corn, beans, squash, and melons,
the varieties change from year to year as they experiment. This
year they’re growing four varieties of squash, pinto and Iroquois
red beans, peas and gourds, and an old variety of watermelon,
‘Moon and Stars,’ an African American cultivar long known to
t h e e a r t h k n o w s m y n a m e
15
Pueblo gardeners. Close by, Clayton has planted Nicotiana rus- tica, an indigenous strain of tobacco used in religious cere- monies. We walk slowly down rows of corn four feet tall,
listening as the deep green leaves rustle in the hot afternoon
wind.
“You start with good thoughts, good intentions, prayers,”
Clayton says when I ask how they begin each planting season.
“Once you begin the seasonal cycle, taking care of the earth, it
should be on your mind every day. You complete the process. It
becomes a responsibility for taking care of the earth. So each day
you have to be aware of what you started and where you want to
take it.
“This is Hopi blue corn,” he says, running a long green leaf
through his fingers. “It has a shorter growing season than other
heirloom corns. It’s good in a year when the water supply is un-
certain.”
New Mexico was in a deep drought for six years beginning in
1996. In 2001, Clayton says, they bottomed out. “People were
breaking locks on the irrigation system to get water.” If it had
gotten any worse, he says, people might have been killed. This
year the drought seems to have broken. They’ve finally had good
rain.
The corn is intercropped with beans and peas, but not in the
way the Iroquois would have done it in the Northeast, where rain
is plentiful. “The corn is picked at the end of September,” Clay-
ton explains. “The peas then take off up the dried stalks. Leaving
the dried stalks and leaves in the fields shelters the peas and pinto
beans from the wind and frost.”
Pueblo gardens were described in some of the conquistadors’
chronicles as slovenly—weedy and without order—which they
saw as a reflection of the Indians’ moral character. A more dis-
cerning chronicler who was not looking for moral analogies
recorded the way one year’s healthy crop could be seen coming
up through the stubble and straw of the previous year’s, needing
only a little hoeing and moderate irrigation to help it along.
p a t r i c i a k l i n d i e n s t
16
What this chronicler describes sounds strikingly like the no-till or
“do nothing” method Fukuoka rediscovered in the 1970s.
The blue corn is grown for making piki bread, Clayton tells
me as we stand in the cornfield. “My wife and daughters use an
ancient way of processing it. Piki is a very thin bread, high in iron
and calcium. The technology for making it is only found among
the Pueblos of New Mexico and the Hopi in Arizona. It’s a local
corn and a local bread.”
The making of good piki bread is an art. Pueblo women kneel
before a large flat stone balanced above a hot fire in a stone en-
closure. When the stone is hot enough, the experienced piki-
bread maker mixes the ground blue corn meal with juniper ash
and spring water, scoops some up, and then, with one swift
move, lays a thin coating over the surface of the rock and quickly
peels it off. She then rolls it, like parchment, one leaf within an-
other. Each generation of Pueblo women teaches the next how to
make it.
“In the fall, we pull the corn and put it away for the winter,”
Clayton explains. He has shown me photographs of his grand-
children learning to remove the seeds from the corn. “The har-
vest of the corn,” he says quietly, “is that the end or the beginning
of the cycle?”
I remember the moment that question came to me. It was the
summer I planted my first garden and realized that seeds were
one of the most important parts of my harvest. It felt as if I’d
been initiated into a fundamental truth, something so simple and
obvious that I wondered at my lifetime of ignorance before I had
a garden.
“If we walked up into those hills,” Clayton says, gesturing
to the east, “I could show you the remains of thousands of
gardens.”
The sky, which has been a deep blue bowl all day, has filled
with huge mounds of billowing clouds. They lay purple shadows
on the flanks of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. The air begins
to cool a little as we turn and slowly walk back. We talk about
t h e e a r t h k n o w s m y n a m e
17
how hopeful and promising the new restorative gardening move-
ments are in their reverence for the wisdom of ancient practices
and traditional cultures. Clayton returns to Fukuoka, Jeavons,
and Mollison.
“These people have taken the time to observe natural sys-
tems—they’ve begun to talk to the land,” he says. “The land be-
gan to speak to them, the plants began to speak to them. And
they began to listen. So they began to communicate back and
forth. So I realized that this type of agriculture is universal, be-
cause the mother is speaking to us. The mother has always spo-
ken to us. But we haven’t listened. Like all children, we don’t
listen, we know it all. As human development goes, maybe we’re
just barely getting out of our teens. We’re maybe just now begin-
ning to listen to her.”
As the sun starts to set, the light on the fields turns gold and
the clouds flush rose.
“When my family is out here working, everyone stops to
watch the sun set,” Clayton says. They take fifteen minutes and
just stand still. He adds, “Okay, I tell them, now we’re gonna get
paid.”
Española
“We’ve been in this valley since the seventeenth century,” David
Fresquez says as we sit in the living room with Loretta, his wife,
and their daughter, Jennifer.
By the time I found their house, the sun had risen high and the
heat was intense. The Fresquez family had already finished the
morning’s work in the garden out back and taken refuge inside.
Later, after I leave, they will venture out again to harvest for the
farmers’ market. Sometimes, David says, they’ve been known to
be out there picking basil guided by the glow of flashlights.
“Everything was farming here,” David explains. “Once when
I was hunting I found letters from the early 1800s in a little cabin
in the north here, and I read them. They were always talking
p a t r i c i a k l i n d i e n s t
18
about the land—the weather and the land, that was it. It was al-
ways the land. Always, always the land.” His voice slows as he
repeats the word always, always, emphasizing the bond between the old Hispanic families and the land of Española Valley.
“When Loretta did her family tree, it was the same thing,” he
adds. “This one’s a farmer, that one’s a farmer. I know my fam-
ily’s the same way.”
“We were raised to be close to the land,” Loretta says quietly.
She is a reserved woman. It will take hours, and the exchange of
stories, for her to speak of what her garden has given her.
David Ramon Fresquez is descended from a miner named Jan
Frishz, also known as Juan Fresco, who was born in 1570 in
Flanders. Frishz emigrated to New Mexico in 1617, coming up
from Mexico City to explore for minerals. The story goes that
when he and two other Flemish miners traveled back to Mexico
City and brought mining equipment up to Santa Fe, it was de-
stroyed by envious colonial settlers. Frishz returned to New
Spain and did not come back to Santa Fe until 1625, when he
traveled north with the wagon train carrying Fray Alonso de Be-
navides, the Franciscan superior of missions, who brought back
with him the small wooden statue of the Virgin that became
known as La Conquistadora. This time Frishz stayed, marrying a
Spanish woman and eventually becoming mayor of Isleta. Over
generations, the name evolved from Frishz to Fresqui to Fresquez.
Loretta’s roots in this valley reach back to the 1700s through
her father, Salomon Jaramillo, and her mother, Maria Espinoza.
She grew up surrounded by a beautiful orchard and ate from her
family’s extensive garden. Every generation of David’s and
Loretta’s families has lived off the land. It was only with their
generation that the tie to the land was almost broken.
I met the Fresquez family at the Santa Fe Farmers’ Market one
Saturday morning, waiting my turn to speak to them as they
stood under a white tent with a sign that read monte vista organic farm behind them. A chef in a starched white tunic had gotten there before me, and he was deep in conversation,
t h e e a r t h k n o w s m y n a m e
19
laughing and talking as he chose what to cook that day from
their display of beautiful vegetables and fruit. I could see baskets
of potatoes—red, gold, blue, white, and purple; firm heads of
red-striped garlic; gorgeous, fat tomatoes—red, yellow, and
orange—plus red and green chilies, of course, and neat bunches
of deep green herbs. Arranged near these were bags of crisp
greens, bowls of strawberries, plates of sliced melon, and bou-
quets of brilliantly colored dahlias.
The Santa Fe Farmers’ Market is resplendent on a Saturday
morning in summer. The smell of roasting chilies wafts through
the air. You can watch as a man turns the round cage of a chili
roaster mounted in the bed of a pickup. Cloth-covered tables
are spread with displays of tomatillos and arrays of melons or
squash. Ristras of garlic and chilies hang from cords strung
across the booths. Organic farmers bring fresh chickens and
eggs. Others offer artisanal cheeses and breads. There are grow-
ers who offer only mesclun or stunning bouquets of flowers. I see,
and sample, jams and jellies and stop to admire the elaborately
woven wreaths of dried flowers. Everyone offers a chance to taste
the produce. The competition is stiff, the clientele sophisticated.
Farmers drive in from all over northern New Mexico to partici-
pate in the rich, communal life of this market.
Every Saturday and Tuesday, the Fresquez family makes the
drive down from Española, a small town situated in the green
expanse of valley between the Sangre de Cristo Mountains to the
east and the Jemez range to the west, home to many of the old
Hispanic families. It’s a rural community and fairly homoge-
nous, in contrast with the moneyed and often rootless mix of
people in Santa Fe. The market has the power to connect these
communities, which are separated by the wide gulf between
those who grow food and those who buy it. And as David,
Loretta, and Jennifer’s stories will teach me, growing food also
has the power to restore and renew an ethnic heritage effaced and
nearly lost to assimilation.
“If somebody wants to know my family’s background,” Jen-
p a t r i c i a k l i n d i e n s t
20
nifer says with energy, “my short version is we’re Mexican. If
anybody wants to hear more, then I have to explain the whole
New Mexico situation.”
Jennifer is a student at the Culinary Institute of America in
upstate New York, which for her is a natural extension of grow-
ing up in a family that has always grown its own food. But leav-
ing New Mexico has also meant traveling to a part of the country
where few people understand her ethnic heritage. “When people
try to guess what I am,” she says, “they usually guess Italian or
Greek, something like that—for my brother too. Neither of us is
bilingual, we’re monolingual, so we have that too. People have
all these preconceived ideas about what we are, who we are.”
First of all, Jennifer says, the Spanish spoken in their region is
archaic, based on a very old form of the language that developed
in isolation and has been preserved in the rural communities in
the northern Rio Grande Valley. It’s radically different from the
Spanish spoken by Puerto Ricans or the Mexican Americans
from California or Texas she has met in her travels.
“Other Latinos don’t understand why I don’t speak Spanish,”
she says. “They think it’s a willful assimilation. So I have to ex-
plain about my parents being punished for speaking their own
language.”
“Punished?” I ask.
“They wouldn’t let us speak Spanish when we were little.”
David, who has been sitting quietly, watching Jennifer, suddenly
begins to speak. “In our school system. It made me ashamed to
speak Spanish when I was a kid. I wouldn’t say things. I knew the
word in Spanish, but I wouldn’t say it because I was ashamed.
‘Only English, only English, only English,’” he says, imitating the
tones of a scolding Anglo teacher.
“I’m still ashamed,” Loretta says with surprising candor.
The pressure to assimilate extended to anything that identified
them as ethnic Americans, including food. “I wouldn’t have
dared to take tortillas to school,” Loretta says. “We were so
ashamed to let other people know we were eating tortillas. Oh,
t h e e a r t h k n o w s m y n a m e
21
God! You can’t let anybody know that.” She took sandwiches
made with white bread instead.
“White bread was exotic,” Jennifer says, laughing.
At home, real food came from the land and they raised it
themselves. “During the war my father worked in the ship-
yards in San Francisco,” Loretta says. “He was away a lot, so my
mother was alone with the children. She used to plant a big gar-
den. We lived off that.” Loretta grew up canning hundreds of jars
of fruits and vegetables.
“My mom’s family garden,” Jennifer remembers, “was such a
magical place. All the cousins feel the same way. We all remem-
ber my grandfather with his straw hat.”
Loretta smiles as Jennifer speaks. Shame and the memory of
shame fade in the presence of the rich, sensual memories of the
garden.
“My mother’s parents had a beautiful orchard,” Jennifer says.
“It was much bigger than what we have now. They had apples,
cherries, pears, peaches, apricots. The trees were all concentrated
around the ditch. They didn’t like us to be too close. That partic-
ular ditch was deep, people used to drown in it.” The ditch—an
acequia—was centuries old. “I remember my grandfather irrigat- ing from that ditch,” Jennifer continues. “It was exciting to see
all the water coming in. The ditch was on a hill and the garden
was lower, so the water would flow down into it. My grandfather
would be directing the water where he needed it. You only have
a certain amount of time. There are gates all over the property.
It’s interactive—it’s not like turning on a switch or opening a
faucet.”
She pauses, radiant, then adds, “It’s funny, because you don’t
realize that’s not how people get water everywhere in the world.
The relationship we have with water is very important to us. The
ditches are very important. Irrigating from the ditches means
people have to share. Everyone’s responsible.”
The cleaning, maintenance, and regulation of the thousand
ditches in northern New Mexico is done by neighbors who form
p a t r i c i a k l i n d i e n s t
22
an association of shareholders, or parciantes, which is governed by a comisión of three members. The word acequia can refer both to the ditch and to the association of landholders whose
land is irrigated by lateral ditches that branch from the larger
main ditch. Each parciante’s share of water is assessed according to the size of his field. In exchange for water, each shareholder
must offer work— cleaning the ditch with his neighbors each
spring—or money in lieu of work. The ditch manager, elected by
the parciantes and the comisión, is called the mayordomo. Up north, where David and Loretta have just bought a larger piece
of land so they can grow even more to take to market, David has
been elected mayordomo. “Whenever I think about New Mexico,” Jennifer says with
emotion, “it’s one of the things that’s always been there and will
always be there, the ditches. It’s what makes us, us.
“That, and having my grandparents, and running wild in
the orchards—I think I was very lucky to grow up with all of
that. And here, at my parents’ place, being part of growing food
from start to finish, harvesting something I planted, I think, This came from me. That’s really a beautiful feeling. It’s sad that mainstream Americans are losing that—or have lost it,” she says,
pausing. Then she adds, “Or never had it at all.”
“I remember how my grandfather’s cellar smelled of apples,”
Loretta says. She has been watching intently as Jennifer speaks,
moved and pleased. “For a long time I could conjure up that
smell.” Conjuring smell, conjuring memory, Loretta conjures a
sense of time and place, a sense of herself as a person undivided,
connected through the generations of her people to the land.
David, who has been smiling and nodding as Jennifer de-
scribes the life of the ditch, is roused to his own associations by
Loretta’s memories. “My grandfather and father, they used to
grow a lot of corn and chilies—and pumpkins,” he says.
“That’s a lot of what our cuisine is,” Jennifer explains. “It’s
built around those things.”
“And the blue corn meal . . . ,” David puts in.
t h e e a r t h k n o w s m y n a m e
23
When I ask if their traditional cuisine is very different from
Mexican cuisine, they all speak at once. “Oh, yes!” they say, ex-
cited, happy. Food is their favorite topic—the bridge that carries
them over a river of loss.
“And it’s not Spanish either,” Jennifer says, insistent. “It’s a
mix of the foods of the Indians here and some Mexican things. A
lot of it, I would say, has more to do with the Pueblo Indians.
“All our dishes are based on the regional chili, which is the
long green Mexican chili. We eat it two ways. We eat it fresh, as
roasted green chili. Then we have what we call red chili, hot,
they’re ground, and then we make a sauce out of them. That was
what people did in the winter. They had their red chilies. Now we
can have green chili all year long because we can freeze it. So we
roast the chili and then we freeze it.
“You always want to have enough chilies to get you through
the year. You have to dry the chilies, then take all the seeds out.
Then you have to rinse each one off, because stuff gets in there,
you know—spiders and dust. Then you dry it for a month and a
half. And then you take it to the mill. There’s still a mill in Es-
pañola,” Jennifer says, “or you can grind it yourself.”
Jennifer remembers how Loretta’s mother always hung her
ristras of drying chili in her enclosed porch.
“I think Jennifer’s preserving our heritage more than we are,
you know,” David says, “because she goes back and she wants to
learn from my mother how to do things.”
“I ask her how to cook traditional dishes from this area,” Jen-
nifer says. “We have a lot of traditional dishes that people still
eat that are very, very old. Like around holidays—Lent, Easter,
Christmas. During Lent—you know, we’re Catholic—there are
all these foods that are very symbolic. You eat this at this time,
you eat that at that time—”
“You push it back, you know. Try to suppress it,” Loretta
breaks in, her thoughts emerging in fragments. “You miss those
things. I find myself longing for. . .”
“For what?” I ask.
p a t r i c i a k l i n d i e n s t
24
“Foods—like what my mother used to cook. The Lenten
foods, I really miss them. Panocha. That’s sprouted blue corn
pudding. We used to grow our own blue corn,” Loretta says.
“My mother used to sprout hers behind the stove.”
“My mother makes it every year,” Jennifer says, with great af-
fection, “then she mails it, packed in ice, to my brother and me
wherever we are. It’s a lovely thing. I’m just so excited when it
comes. I share it with my friends. They wait for it too. This is the
only time of the year we eat it. We serve it with cream or ice
cream.”
Hopi blue corn, sacred to the Pueblo Indians, was adopted by
the Spanish as a food with symbolic meaning, to be eaten on the
holiest days in the Christian calendar, the days from Holy Thurs-
day, when Jesus had his last meal with his friends, until Easter
Sunday, the day of resurrection. Like the piki bread Margaret
Brascoupé learned how to make from her mother and has taught
her daughters to make, panocha, also made from blue corn, con-
nects Loretta with her mother and her daughter. Sprouted blue
corn pudding, ritually pure food, is something Loretta can claim,
and pass on, with love. It is untainted by shame.
Hearing about it makes me want some. It sounds as if they
have a renewed sense of how much their heritage means to them,
I say.
“Now more than ever,” David agrees. He has a story about
his longing for the old food ways too and tells his own blue corn
story.
“I remember when I was five, six, seven, I’d walk to school,
about a mile and a half, two miles, and when I’d get back from
school, I’d stop at my father’s aunt’s place. She lived on my
grandparents’ farm in a separate room attached to the side, by
herself. One room, that was all. There was a bed on one side and
a stove on the other. Lala, I think her name was. And you know,
when she cooked a rabbit, she used every part of that rabbit. The
lungs, the liver, everything would go into a stew. She used to
make a wonderful meal. And they had pigs. Pork was pretty
t h e e a r t h k n o w s m y n a m e
25
much the staple—the hocks, hams, bacon, everything. They used
to make chichimangas. It’s bacon, but it’s thicker. They’d cut it
into one-inch cubes, then they’d render the fat, then store it in a
five-gallon bucket with a lid.
“We’d come from school and she’d have fish and blue corn
tortillas and she’d add those chichilones, the little bacons—oh,
and they were so good! To this day, I cannot find one person who
can make a tortilla like that. Because the corn was so intense. I’ve
been trying myself. I bought the blue corn last year. And I don’t
know what it is, whether it’s the techniques, the right mix of wa-
ter, salt—”
“It’s not the recipe, it’s the technique,” Jennifer says, break-
ing in.
“Maybe your grandmother knows?” I suggest, turning to Jen-
nifer.
“My grandma knows,” she says, meaning David’s mother,
who still lives nearby. “In fact, I had this conversation with her
last week, because I went over to her house. She had roasted chil-
ies that day, and you need fresh tortillas to go with them. She
doesn’t make tortillas very often anymore, but she did that day.
You can have the recipe, but it’s the technique—you have to do it
every day for ten thousand days in a row to get them to taste like
my grandma’s.”
“My mother used to make them with one hand,” Loretta says,
“and she’d roll with the other. She could make them real fast.
Then she would slap them on the top of the stove.”
All three of them start talking about the sound of Loretta’s
mother making those tortillas, remembering that slap.
“Life is about taste,” David says, and then we all stand up and
head out the back door to see their garden.
f
“We don’t really have a traditional garden,” Loretta explains as
we walk. “We don’t grow traditional food.”
“We grow what we like to eat,” Jennifer explains. “But we
p a t r i c i a k l i n d i e n s t
26
don’t grow chilies, or the corn. We don’t have very much land.
Those things are very land-intensive—chilies, corn, squash. You
need acres and acres of land.”
Outside the kitchen door is their patio, with work sheds to
one side, and beyond that the garden begins. The land is a flat
rectangle, with a raised berm above the irrigation ditch that
marks the southern edge. They use every inch of space, so even
the narrow strip of raised earth between the ditch and the fence
sprouts flowers and herbs.
“Look at these apples,” David says of a single tree beside the
irrigation ditch. “I never put anything on this land, and look at
this fruit.” He cradles a bright red apple in his weathered palm.
The garden is laid out in long, neat rows with wide paths of
grass all the way around it. A wall of dahlias—hundreds of them,
a feast of color and texture— crosses the front of the garden.
Most of them are as tall as we are, some taller. David begins to
choose his favorites, gathering a bouquet for me.
“I started most of the farming here,” he says as he selects from
his prolific blooms one by one. “So I thought to myself, I’ve al-
ways loved tomatoes, melons, the sweet stuff. And I love flowers,
so I started to grow dahlias, and tomatoes, just Romas. I had the
tomatoes all ready to dry and thought, well, I’ll just sell a few,
make a little bit of money. So we went over to the farmers’ mar-
ket in Santa Fe and I sold all my Romas. So that’s where it all
started, you know. It started with the tomatoes.”
Five years ago, after twenty-three years working at Los
Alamos National Laboratory, David got laid off. “That’s when I
got into growing big-time. We started doing plots and plots of
potatoes, tomatoes, onions, garlic, and I always had flowers. We
had all these beds here in front full of dahlias.”
“You know what people always say to us about the dahlias?”
Jennifer says. “They say, ‘Oh, we love dahlias—my grandmother
used to grow these.’”
They’re so obviously a team, these three, and they love being
part of the market.
t h e e a r t h k n o w s m y n a m e
27
“It’s the people,” Jennifer says.
“Every week, you meet new people,” David agrees. “People
from all over the world. You form relationships.”
“And experimenting with new foods,” Jennifer says. “We’ve
tried a lot of different things. This year we’re growing twelve dif-
ferent kinds of potatoes. American consumers, they know red
potato, russet potato—that’s their whole knowledge of potatoes.
So part of it is educating people, talking to people about the
things that we grow.”
“And then we’ve met so many restaurant owners and chefs,”
Loretta says, “and they like our produce. So the more they like it,
the more ideas we get about foods and what to grow and how to
grow them. And on and on it goes.”
“You learn so much,” David says.
The world comes to them in the market, and now, as they’ve
begun to travel through Europe together, they go out to the
world, visiting local markets in Italy, France, and Spain, talking
to growers, sampling their food.
“We love food,” Jennifer says. “Not just traditional foods,
but we love all food. When we went to Europe last year, it was
great, because we got to try all this different food. We got to talk
to a lot of people. People there really appreciated that as Ameri-
cans we were so interested in tasting food that was foreign to us.
Because that’s not what typically happens, I guess, when Ameri-
cans travel abroad.
“One thing I really loved about Europe,” she adds, “is that
they understand what food is—it’s central to their culture. They
eat in big groups, multigenerational groups. Dinner goes on for
a long time. It’ll be ten o’clock on a Tuesday night! That’s how
food should be—it should be part of your relationships with peo-
ple, especially your family. Then people go out in the evenings.
They stroll. There’s movement,” she says with emphasis. “That’s when people in America are home watching TV. Americans are
very lonely,” she adds quietly.
I nod, remembering the huge gatherings of my mother’s Ital-
p a t r i c i a k l i n d i e n s t
28
ian American family—all the aunts and uncles, cousins, nieces,
nephews. There were always older people, always babies. And
always lots of food. Stories, controversy, laughter. And then,
when the family unraveled, the silence, the loneliness. When I
miss my family, I make pasta.
“You know, people have a natural affinity to come together
over food,” Jennifer says. As we walk, Loretta begins selecting
tomatoes for me to take home. She hands them to Jennifer, who
cradles them in her arms. “But the way we live our lives now is
going away from that. America has no food culture. The farmers’
markets are filling that void. I think the market in Santa Fe has
done an exceptional job.”
At the market, the Fresquezes have become teachers. Young
Anglos, new farmers committed to growing everything organi-
cally, are eager students. They’re hungry to learn and respectful
of David and Loretta’s experience.
Loretta steps into the flower house, one of the four hoop
houses, two for flowers and two for vegetables. She wants to show
me the tuberoses they’ve just started growing. The scent is en-
veloping, intoxicating. They’ll go fast at the market in Santa Fe.
David’s passion for tomatoes means that they grow a hundred
varieties of tomatoes—a thousand plants—keeping notes that
run to seven pages on their size, flavor, and color, weeding out the
ones they don’t like. Just as Jennifer said, they also have an amaz-
ing array of potatoes—ten thousand plants’ worth. And five
thousand onion plants—Vidalia, Spanish, and Italian—grow
near five thousand garlic plants, including the beautiful mottled
red French variety I saw at their market display, with six hundred
leeks nearby. They’ve begun experimenting with dehydrating the
garlic and making it into powder. The palest jade green, it’s sweet
and mild, nothing like store-bought garlic powder.
Four long rows of mixed greens—‘Green Forest,’ ‘Galactica,’
‘Lola rosa,’ mizuna, and claytonia—are sold in two ways, as in-
dividual heads and as part of the Fresquezes’ own mix, which is
rinsed four times and includes beet tops, spinach, and arugula.
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29
There are D’Avignon, French breakfast, and Easter egg radishes,
a hundred eggplants, strawberries, raspberries, and beds of as-
paragus, broccoli, and carrots.
When David was growing up, his family grew only one vari-
ety of melon—melones mexicanos, as he knew them. Now, through Jake’s Melons, a mail-order seed company, his family
experiments with French and Italian varieties in addition to local
ones. “My family didn’t have the means that we have,” he says.
“The rest of the world is giving me their best.”
And then there are the pumpkins. The array is astonishing.
The standard orange variety is dwarfed by enormous bright red-
orange specimens with deep, even seams. There are pumpkins in
jade green, blue-green, dark forest green; some with specks, some
half green and half orange, and others a strange metallic golden
brown. Round, squat, puffed like pillows with depressed centers,
indigenous and exotic, they all display nature’s profligate variety.
Is there one they love most?
Oh, yes: it’s called Tio, for Loretta’s uncle, Teodoro Jara-
millo, who gave them their first seeds. No one has any idea what
the actual name of the variety might be, but with its green skin
and sweet, soft flesh, it surpasses all others. The Fresquezes sell
fresh pumpkin by the slice at the market, where they invite peo-
ple to taste their produce, to try new things.
This year, David says, they harvested twenty tons of pump-
kins from their four hundred plants. It doesn’t seem possible that
all this could grow on a little more than one acre in what is es-
sentially their backyard. They have learned to load the land with
as much as it will bear without depleting the soil, using no chem-
icals and wasting no water.
Monte Vista Farm represents both a leap forward—a new in-
ternational impulse, as David, Loretta, and Jennifer reach out to
the world beyond their valley and beyond the borders of the
United States—and a release from the experience of being de-
fined as strangers in their own land. David and Loretta Fresquez
have never lived anywhere but this valley. They both grew up
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30
within five miles of this garden. Their parents and grandparents,
generation upon generation, lived off the land. The pressure to
assimilate that led David and Loretta not to pass on their lan-
guage—a choice that was not a choice—finds redress here, where
they create a wide, embracing world together and take it to mar-
ket in Santa Fe.
I watch as Loretta fills Jennifer’s arms with tomatoes of every
color and size, all of them still warm from the sun. David leans
into his dahlias, disappearing as he reaches to cut deep purple,
warm peach, soft pink flowers for me to take home. Finally Jen-
nifer can’t hold any more tomatoes and David’s free hand can’t
close around any more stems.
“I never dreamed that we would be doing this,” Loretta says.
“Everybody grows a garden, you know? Big deal. But now we
eat, breathe, and sleep gardens. Everything we do is defined by
our work here.
“People couldn’t believe it when I gave up my job.” Loretta
decided to retire early from her own job at Los Alamos and join
David in the garden full-time. “‘Do you like farming?’ people ask
me. ‘Isn’t it a lot of work?’ What was my job?” she says with feel-
ing. “I wasn’t doing anything good for anyone.” She was just
earning a wage. “Here we’re making an honest living doing
something we truly enjoy from the heart. We’re teaching other
people the importance of good food. I never realized how much I
knew until now. And we’re keeping our heritage by keeping our
food. It’s a way of life for us, our food.”
“When I’m out here,” David says, “just working the land, I’m
so happy, so content. Just being here. Especially in the morning.
When you’re out here just working the soil and putting seed in
the ground and picking up the harvest, you know, you feel like
you could live forever. . .”
Monte Vista, they call this place—mountain view. From
where they work, you can look up and see horses grazing in the
near distance. Your eye can travel across the valley to the moun-
tains, east and west, where huge dramas unfold every summer af-
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31
ternoon, especially in this monsoon season—dark roiling clouds,
bolts of lightning, dark chains of rain connecting heaven and
earth, and then, an hour later, the rainbows, vast arcs of color
spanning the ridges, every band electrified, lit up against the dark
sky. You can stand here, dry and safe, musing among the vegeta-
bles while bees ravish the flowers, and watch the ridgeline where
huge forces contend.
“When there are birds sitting there on the wires watching us
while we work,” Loretta says, sweetness filling her voice, “I truly
think it’s my parents. Especially the meadowlarks—they sing so
beautifully—and I think how happy they are with what we’re
doing. Now I understand the value of the skills they taught us. To
be close to the earth—that’s what we grew up with, that’s what
I’m about. I never had words for it before. It’s part of who I am.
I’ve completely acknowledged that now.”
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