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As in many other cultures, food among the Mexicanos of La Junta1 is important beyond its function of nurturing the physical body. it is at the center of many important social events, from family meals to larger fiestas, including more private rites of passage such as weddings and fiestas de las quinceañeras (puberty rites celebrating girls’ fifteenth birthdays) and such public rites of intensification as el día de los muertos (the day of the dead). And even among the poor, food is symbolic of their willingness and desire to share what they have, even with strangers like me. Perhaps more than any other single aspect of Mexican culture, its foodways have been accepted in Anglo culture, and they have influenced the way Anglos eat. Many Anglos have become aficionados of Mexican food. to have something as fundamental as food be not only accepted but liked, sometimes passionately, is to have one’s culture validated. it is a small but important victory over Anglo culture, which is often quite hostile to other aspects of Mexican American culture. to reject the foodways of a culture is to profoundly deprecate it. As hosts like to have family and guests appreciate their culinary arts, so a whole culture is validated when both members and outsiders show appreciation for its foodways. thus foodways, because they are so central to our lives, are a significant source of information about us, about the way we see ourselves, about our historical and cultural ties with others, and about our worldview. Although little has been written about the foodways of the La Junta area, in 1979–80 i spent nine months conducting intensive fieldwork on both sides of the Rio Grande, documenting the foodways of Hispanics in the area (cf. Graham 1983, 1984). in addition to collecting many hours of taped interviews and thousands of photographs, i was able to distribute and collect (through the schools on both sides of the border) over three hundred eighteen-page questionnaires on foodways. in this paper, i shall attempt to describe in as much detail as space permits the foodways of 10 Mexican American Traditional Foodways at La Junta de los Ríos Joe S. Graham Mexican American Traditional Foodways i 197 the Mexicanos of La Junta and to provide a historical context for those foodways, which truly reflect a confluence of cultures. Pre-Hispanic Foods at La Junta While there is insufficient information available to describe in detail the foodways of the prehistoric inhabitants of La Junta, they shared some of the basic foods of the present-day cultures, including corn, beans, tomatoes, potatoes, squash, pumpkins, sunflower seeds, and peppers (chiles). these cultivated foods were supplemented by wild plants and animals, as well as the domesticated turkey. diego Pérez de Luxán, who accompanied Antonio de Espejo in the 1582 entrada to La Junta, gave a few details about the foodways of the inhabitants of the area. He wrote that up the Río Conchos from La Junta, the Conchos indians “live in peace and support themselves on fish, mesquite, and mescal (a food made of agave)” (Luxán [1582] 1966, 155–56). Espejo’s own account is more detailed, noting that the Conchos “live on rabbits, hares, and deer, which they hunt and which are abundant, and on some crops of maize, gourds, Castilian melons, and watermelons, like winter melons, which they plant and cultivate, and on fish, mascales, which are the leaves of lechuguilla, a plant half a vara in height, the stalks of which have green leaves. they cook the stocks of this plant and make a preserve like quince jam. it is very sweet, and they call it mascale” (bolton 1916, 170). the Spaniards found this pattern of diet shared pretty much by indians all along the Río Conchos, down to La Junta, where Espejo records that the Jumanos had “maize, gourds, beans, game of foot and wing, and fish of many kinds from two rivers that carry much water” (bolton 1916, 172). Corn was the earliest of the major cultivated foods of the Americas and the only cereal cultivated in the Southwest before the introduction of wheat and other grains by the Spaniards. Even after the appearance of the other important cultivated foods, corn remained the most important single staple in the diet. As we shall see, it continues to play a significant, though diminished, role in the lives of the descendants of the early La Junta inhabitants. Pre-Hispanic La Juntans...

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