A Tortilla Is Like Life: Food and Culture in the San Luis Valley of Colorado

Notes

CHAPTER 1 1. See Rael 1940, 1942, 1957; see also the Library of Congress American Memory Web site on Juan B. Rael’s collection: http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/ rghtml/rghome.html. The Web site contains audio recordings of many songs, with transcriptions of the original Spanish along with English translations. Rael married Quirina Espinoza of Antonito, who was an ancestor of study participant Anna Garcia’s husband, Castelar Garcia. 2. I have done fieldwork in Bosa (Nuoro) on the island of Sardinia and in Lancaster, Pennsylvania (Counihan 1999), as well as in Florence, Italy (Counihan 2004) and Colorado’s San Luis Valley. 3. Some sources on Anglo-Hispanic conflict in the Southwest are Deutsch 1987; Gonzales 1999; Gonzales 2003; Larson 1975; Paredes 1958; Peña 1998a; Pulido 1996; Rosales 1997; Rosenbaum 1998; Taylor and Taggart 2003. 4. The American Anthropological Association Code of Ethics includes the following prescriptions: “Anthropological researchers must do everything in their power to ensure that their research does not harm the safety, dignity, or privacy of the people with whom they work. . . . Anthropological researchers must determine in advance whether their hosts/providers of information wish to remain anonymous or receive recognition, and make every effort to comply with those wishes. . . . Anthropological researchers should obtain in advance the informed consent of persons being studied. . . . It is understood that the informed consent process is dynamic and continuous; the process should be initiated in the project design and continue through implementation by way of dialogue and negotiation with those studied. . . . Anthropologists . . . should recognize their debt to the societies in which they work and their obligation to reciprocate with people studied in appropriate ways.” See www.aaanet.org/committees/ethics/ ethcode.htm. Accessed January 25, 2006. 5. See Behar and Gordon 1995; Gluck and Patai 1991; Wolf 1992. 6. Testimonios emerged as a literary genre out of the liberation struggles of indigenous people, workers, and campesinos in Latin America in the 1960s and N O T E S N O T E S T O P A G E S 8–10 212 1970s and are widely known through the book I Rigoberta Menchú (Menchú and Burgos-Debray 1987). Beverly (1993, 70–71) defines testimonios as “told in the first person by a narrator who is also the real protagonist or witness of the events she or he recounts. . . . The production of a testimonio often involves the tape recording and then the transcription and editing of an oral account by an interlocutor who is an intellectual, journalist, or writer.” The Latina Feminist Group (2001, 2) defines testimonios as “a crucial means of bearing witness and inscribing into history those lived realities that would otherwise succumb to the alchemy of erasure.” 7. My work aspires to what the Latina Feminist Group (2001) calls “telling to live.” Like Benmayor, Torruellas, and Juarbe (1997, 153) I use women’s stories to “paint the landscape of collective memory.” I believe that building knowledge is a collaborative project between the researcher and the study participants. My approach is similar to what Abarca (2006, 9) calls theorizing “from the ground up” in her study of the charlas culinarias (culinary chats) she had with working-class women. In my interviews, diverse women in Antonito revealed what the Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci (1955, 3) described as “common sense, . . . the philosophy of the non-philosophers,” which contains an “established conception of the world.” See Nelson 1980, which provides a collection of what she called testamentos from Hispanic women folk artists of the San Luis Valley, Colorado. 8. Jim Taggart worked with José Inez (Joe) Taylor, a self-described Chicano, storyteller, writer, and worker, to produce Alex and the Hobo: A Chicano Life and Story. It begins with Taylor’s semiautobiographical novella and follows with an exegesis of its key themes based on a long-term interview dialogue between Taylor and Taggart. Taylor emerges as an organic intellectual who has developed a critical class analysis of his culture. 9. Student assistants Justin Garcia, Kari John, Megan Kirkpatrick, Lauren Schaller, and Maegan Crandall helped with the transcriptions, and I thank them all. 10. On power in the ethnographic process, see Appadurai 1988; Behar and Gordon 1995; Wolf 1992. Appadurai (1988) asked, “How can we construct our voices so they represent the diversity of voices we hear in the field? How can we construct in anthropology a dialogue that captures the encounter of our own many voices with the diversity of voices we hear and purport to represent...