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Introduction
- University of Minnesota Press
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· 1 · Introduction Cuando en el río va con el corriente. When in the river, go with the current. Ihope you’ll describe how the chile feels when it starts to rot!” Estella was clearly excited about the prospect that I might write about our experiences together over the last year, and she had very specific ideas about what I should document. Estella usually had strong ideas about everything; this was something I learned about her very quickly. Estella was not a particularly large woman. She was a little below average height and a bit stocky, but her personality made her seem larger than life and gave her a very commanding presence. For Estella, the daily lived practices , the taken-for-granted, the textures, smells, and sounds of her colonia needed to be documented alongside her work as an activist. So it was crucial that my depiction of her at-home ristra production business include not only the economic and social aspects of this culturally and geographically specific form of income supplementation but also a detailed description of the milieu. This would have to include the texture of the chiles after a few days in the sun, like gusanos, or worms; squishy, slippery, and not too nice smelling either—but something I had to feel for myself, with both hands, to really know when they were too far gone to be useable. At least that is what Estella said as she pushed my hands into the rotten chile, smiling and laughing loudly all the while. In the late fall Estella, a central leader and activist in the colonia of Recuerdos, turned the front porch of her father’s trailer into a lively production line for ristras. Ristras are red-chile wall hangings that can be both decorative and used in cooking and are ubiquitous signs of the intersection of New Mexico’s agricultural and tourist economies. In tourist towns throughout the Southwestern United States, ristras are a common site that fetch big bucks, particularly when they are as fresh and bright red as they are in the fall. Production begins with a call to a local chile producer, who will drop off an enormous crate of red chile, which then must be sorted by size, a job at which the children excel with a little guidance. Next the ristras are constructed using string and brute force through an artful “ 2 INTRODUCTION weaving job that takes more practice than it would seem. Finally the chile producer, also known as the middleman, returns to buy back the ristras for a few dollars each. He will go sell them in the north of the state in tourist destinations such as Santa Fe and Taos for twenty dollars or more, making a handsome profit. The women will have made a few dollars an hour and had a lot of time for chisme (gossip) while also keeping up with child care and household chores. Although ristras would never make Estella or the women who joined her rich, there were several reasons why they made sense as a seasonal project. Estella and her neighbors were primarily stay-at-home mothers and wives, whose husbands were field workers, and, like everyone in Recuerdos and nearly everyone in all of New Mexico’s colonias, they were also Mexican immigrants. Immigrant field labor families make very little money, so, when opportunities such as ristra making appear, women often take advantage of them. Through their ristra business , women like Estella are creating a “productive” niche for themselves in an agricultural economy, which is heavily dependent on the labor of their husbands, fathers, and sons. These women are already indispensable to this economy, as they are at the base of the social reproduction that keeps the flow of cheap Mexican labor available. This is the heart of colonia communities: the social reproduction of agricultural labor. Ristramakingisaparticularlygoodemploymentmatchforabusymother because she can make a couple of ristras, which take about fifteen to twenty minutes to finish, and then take a break and change a diaper, do a quick load of laundry, or put on a pot of soup. While I was working on the ristra production line, there were always small children around playing together; it was a makeshift daycare, with women coming and going as they saw fit. In their ristra production business, the women created an entrepreneurial space so they could take advantage of their role as cheap labor and use it to suit their needs as mothers and caretakers. This was...