About an hour north of Santa Fe is the village of Chimayó, a place revered by true believers because miracles happen there. Every Holy Week, tens of thousands of Catholics come by car and on foot, along roads that wind off U.S. Route 285 toward the Santuario de Chimayó—the town’s sanctuary, a humble adobe church built around a hole.
The Catholic Church maintains that in the 1800s, a Chimayó man discovered a cross in the ground while digging for water. He placed it inside the local church, but the cross mysteriously returned to the pit the following morning. The man built a sanctuary around the posito (watering hole) to mark this mystery, and it’s still there, inside a small room toward the back of the sacred structure. Two hand shovels stay in the small pit so people can scoop dirt to take home. Hundreds of baby shoes, crutches, pictures, and scribbled notes fill a room nearby, attesting that they found cures for their terminal diseases by merely touching the dirt from the posito. The Catholic Archdiocese of Santa Fe freely admits that the redemptive soil isn’t self-regenerating, but rather comes from the mountain range that serves as the church’s scenic backdrop, the towering Sangre de Cristo—Blood of Christ.
This Lourdes of the Americas is a magical place, and not just because of the location’s supposed curative powers. There is food—bags of roasted pecans sold at roadside stands or from people’s homes, sacks of piñon (pine nuts) harvested from the fragrant, spindly trees, mounds of dried or fresh chiles depending on the season, Chimayó’s other notable cultural product. And a few steps away from the Santuario stands Léona’s, a long but narrow restaurant. It seems like a tourist trap—on the wall hang aprons, T-shirts, packaged chiles, chile powder, and even special TSA-approved flight bags to store food in that ensure it won’t spoil on the plane home. But man does not subsist on faith alone, and this is where pilgrims retire after getting their fill of dirt for the day.
Owner Léona Medina-Tiede is a Chimayó native who helped her family sell meals every year during Holy Week as a child—tamales, burritos, and steaming bowls of posole (stews of pork and corn kernels), accompanied by huge wheat tortillas. She serves food that most Americans call Mexican: chile stews, enchiladas, tamales, and burritos. But it really is New Mexican cuisine, a food developed in isolation over centuries and unlike any other Mexican food in the United States. The chile stews don’t just burn; they’re fleshy, fulsome, derived from pods cultivated in the nearby valleys over centuries by farmers. Enchiladas aren’t rolled tortillas submerged in canned sauce but come stacked like pancakes, made from blue-corn tortillas, glued together with cheese and ground beef, then baptized with a fried egg. Tamales emphasize the masa and the many different kinds of corn grown in New Mexico. If it’s Lent, Léona’s also sells small containers of a brown sugar pudding called panocha—the Spanish-speaking faithful will snicker, though, as that’s the Mexican Spanish slang word for “vagina.”
In Chimayó, as in the rest of New Mexico, people find magic. During the 1980s, the flavors on display here were the Next Great Mexican Food in the United States, kindle for hundreds of restaurants that suddenly offered blue-corn tortilla chips or exotic salsas while decorating with howling coyotes and silhouettes of Kokopelli, the humpbacked, dreadlocked, flute-playing fertility god of the Southwest. Chimayó became the name of restaurants from Virginia to Utah to even Southern California, to the edge of the Pacific at Chimayó at the Beach in Orange County. The food, the names, the colors, and the decor: New Mexican culture was used to evoke a sense of awe, of timelessness, for a cuisine that fizzled out as fast as it blazed across the United States.
New Mexico is simultaneously a land where fusion occurs with the ease and frequency of its spectacular skies, but one also stubbornly, beautifully provincial, protective of its heritage. America’s dalliance with New Mexican food—about fifteen years—receded into the state’s valleys, its mountains and pueblos, shadows and crevices, and the natives don’t mind. Even at the height of its popularity, New Mexico’s favorite dishes never ventured beyond its borders; they still haven’t and probably never will. Trendiness is just not how New Mexico operates, and the Southwestern cuisine movement never understood this, never heeded the warning offered by the writer who warned of the state, “The wide and strange land shaped and reshaped human institutions to its own purposes, and one either learned to live with the blazing sun, the scarcity of water, the dust and interminable distances, and the whispering quiet of empty canyons and mesas, or he admitted failure and moved elsewhere.”1
The Spanish Crown initially explored what’s now New Mexico when they sent forth Francisco Coronado in 1540. He arrived in the territory expecting an alien race but instead found that the Indians made something familiar to the conquistadors: tortillas, the same concoction of maize introduced to them by the Aztecs just twenty years earlier. The Zunis, according to Coronado, made “the best tortillas that I have ever seen anywhere. … They have the best arrangement and method for grind that was ever seen … one of these Indian women here will grind as much flour as four of the Mexicans do.”2
Settlers from Mexico trickled into the territory during the seventeenth century, incorporating their food customs with those of the natives; in turn, the Indians used Mexican ingredients and styles and adapted their cuisine to the new order. And that was life in New Mexico for the next two hundred years, an uneasy living between Spaniards and Indians, but an open embrace of each other’s food cultures until one was nearly indistinguishable from the other and coalesced into an identity called Hispano. It wasn’t until the early 1800s that Americans explored the territory and discovered the region’s cuisine. Most didn’t take kindly to what the hospitable New Mexicans offered. “Miserable muddy coffee, a stew made of mutton smothered in onions, half-baked tortillas … and a few boiled eggs, constitute the best meal it pretends to furnish,” wrote one scout, adding that he had never eaten a New Mexican meal “without it creating in some degree a sensation of nausea at the stomach.”3
It took Charles Fletcher Lummis for an American to celebrate New Mexico’s cornucopia. This chronicler might have done more than anyone else to create nostalgia for California’s mission past, but it was New Mexico that called to his heart the most, a place he described in one of his books as the land of Poco Tiempo—Pretty Soon, a region in perpetual, romantic arrested development. “It is the Great American Mystery—the National Rip Van Winkle—the United States which is not United States,” Lummis enthused in his book The Land of Poco Tiempo. “Why hurry with the hurrying world? The ‘Pretty Soon’ of New Spain is better than the ‘Now! Now!’ of the haggard States.”4
American intellectuals—writers, artists, philosophers, mystics, painters, anthropologists, adventure seekers—flocked to New Mexico because of the hosannas of Lummis and others, to live in a time warp, and published guidebooks and letters on this peculiar American territory. Social scientists authored studies on the region; one of the earliest, a 1904 thesis by New Mexico State student Pearl Cherry Miller titled Mexican Cookery, collected New Mexican recipes such as bizcochos (cookies made with lard, anise, and cinnamon), chicos (dried corn kernels prepared as a soup), and the elusive panocha. “Without [tortillas] and without chile, I doubt whether the ‘Mexicanos’ would consider life worth living,” the aspiring scholar wrote.5
The state drew more national attention during the Balboa Exposition of 1912 in San Diego (the year New Mexico attained statehood), where the state’s exhibit was housed in a Spanish-style adobe. After that, travelers to New Mexico expected everything to look like it originated during the time of Coronado, to the point that one historian felt newcomers “preferred to start with a one-story, three-or four-room Mexican adobe house; if it stood partially in ruins, so much the better.”6 To cope with the expectations of visitors, the Santa Fe City Council passed a resolution aiming to freeze itself in time by requiring that all buildings “conform exteriorially with the Santa Fe style” of architecture, namely adobes.7
Attempts at mummifying New Mexico, however, had the opposite effect on Hispanos: the state’s opening to newcomers meant that the foods of the native residents disappeared under the onslaught of modern times. Railroads brought jobs, which took villagers away from agrarian lifestyles and toward a consumer-based economy; the abandonment of those family farms left the land barren, and food traditions suffered. A 1942 University of Chicago study discovered that in just sixty years, tiny communities near the artists’ colony of Taos had abandoned whole wheat flour for refined flour, fresh cow’s and goat’s milk for canned milk, and nourishing atole (gruel) and chaquehue (hot cereal made from blue corn) in favor of coffee and oatmeal, respectively.8 “Taos culture is inadequate to meet current problems,” another social scientist wrote. “When the Taoseño loses his grazing lands and his farm he is unable to fit himself successfully into a new mode of life. His cultural handicaps make him a misfit, socially and economically, in current affairs.”9
Alarmed at their disappearing civilization, a group of Hispano women created the Sociedad Folklórica de Santa Fe, with a twopronged purpose: to chronicle their atrophying ways, but to also reappropriate them from opportunistic Americans looking to make money off their heritage. What triggered the group’s formation was a 1935 article in Holland’s Magazine that called for the use of bread flour instead of corn to make tortillas. “How nice and light these must be without yeast or shortening,” Cleofas Martinez Jaramillo sarcastically remarked in her memoirs. “And still these smart Americans make money with their writing, and we who know the correct way, sit back and listen.”10
The Sociedad Folklórico gathered collections of stories, penned memoirs, and engaged in amateur anthropology to counter the growing Anglo narrative of their homeland, and one of their most effective publicity tools was cookbooks. Jaramillo published The Genuine New Mexico Tasty Recipes: Potajes Sabrosos in 1939, a collection of foods she made clear weren’t Mexican but rather New Mexican. But the most influential member of the Sociedad was Fabiola Cabeza de Baca Gilbert, who worked with the New Mexico Agricultural Extension Service to teach sanitation and preservation techniques across the state. Hispanos lived in some of the poorest, most isolated communities in the United States, and she sought to uplift her community by reminding them of their proud culinary accomplishments.
In 1931, Cabeza de Baca released Historic Cookery, the first widely available cookbook on New Mexican food. Her home state, she wrote, was “a land of changes. Its blue skies of morning may be its red skies of evening. They have been changes in its people, in its customs, and naturally in its food habits.”11 She invited readers to try the food, but more importantly remember where it came from: “Try the recipes. And when you do, think of New Mexico’s golden days, of red chile drying in the sun, of clean-swept yards, outdoor ovens, and adobe houses on the landscape. Remember the green valleys where good things grow.”12
The Sociedad published other tracts, held fiestas, and organized workshops on traditional crafts, but the preservation battle was a losing one, and the Sociedad knew it. In 1954, Cabeza de Baca Gilbert published her family’s memoirs, We Fed Them Cactus. It’s a book filled with parties, old customs, and gaiety, and also an overwhelming melancholy. “Through four generations, our family has made a living from this land,” she wrote in the introduction, “from cattle and sheep, and lately by selling curios, soda pop, gasoline and food to tourists traveling over U.S. Highway 66.”13
A proud people reduced to selling Coke to Americans. New Mexico’s only chance of survival was by adapting to the new times, by evolving. But the restoration had to wait three more decades and happen far away, on the sunny coast of California.
Rivera seems like the type of restaurant—in a hip, gentrifying part of Los Angeles—that all good people must loathe. The armrests and base of the seats at the bar lounge curve into backward r’s in the same sans serif font as the restaurant’s name. Electronic music pulses in the background as the beautiful people flirt and flit. Random images of Hispanic glory—bullfights, jungles, Aztec pyramids—flash against the walls.
Meals arrive, simultaneously ancient and future-looking. The tamale tastes like a Mexican household come Christmas Eve, ruddy and hearty, but is as flat and as thick as a regular issue of Vogue, and topped with button mushrooms that add a playful, earthy touch; on the plate, in piquant pepper, reads “Stimulus Package,” carefully stenciled—funny! Duck enfrijoladas skips across four distinct, clashing groups—Oaxacan (enfrijoladas are tortillas smeared with black bean paste) in a bitter Puebla-style mole, stuffed with duck and a block of Peruvian chuño potatoes. The tortilla is a proud purple, crafted from the blue corn of New Mexico.
Ah, that tortilla, sweet and chewy, evoking images of adobes inhabited by Anglos wanting to live in the land of Poco Tiempo. This isn’t an atavistic offering, however, but a brilliant summation of this magnificent restaurant, which spans the length of the Hispanic world, from Spain to Brazil to Cal-Mex, all under a decidedly Mexican gaze.
The man behind Rivera, both the restaurant and the name, settles into a private room, where the curved helmet of a conquistador acts as a lampshade. John Rivera Sedlar has just returned from Barcelona at the invitation of the Spanish government, eager to showcase their country’s chefs to the man whom Gourmet once anointed the father of Southwestern cuisine, in the hopes that he might incorporate it at his always packed restaurant.
“Mexican food is so much more flavorful right now than Spanish,” Sedlar says. He speaks in waves, long, looping anecdotes, smooth and lulling, yet his descriptions reel in the attentions of anyone nearby, waiter and customer alike. “It was perceived as a second-class cuisine. But it’s shoulder to shoulder with all the great cuisines of the world.”
Save for a full head of gray hair, Sedlar looks and acts almost exactly like the prodigy who wowed food critics from his Southern California base through the 1980s—except now he’s reinterpreting himself as a pan-Latino magus instead of just focusing on the Southwest. Sedlar explains that though New Mexico is his mistress, it’s Mexican food that’s his amor—but there can’t be one without the other.
“Without Spain, there is no Mexican food as we know it today,” Sedlar explains, pouring shots from a bottle of mescal left to age in barrels that once contained brandy. The finish is sweet, syrupy, caramelized. “And without Mexican food, there is no New Mexican cuisine.”
For those who remember Sedlar in his younger days, painting Southwestern cuisine as a godly revelation, his current comeback as an apostle of pan-Latino food seems unlikely, even opportunistic, but it’s authentic, the evolution inevitable. His childhood in Santa Fe was one where frozen green beans and canned corn masqueraded as home cooking. But Sedlar, of Hispano roots, grimaced through those “terrible, terrible meals” for the promise of summer, when he’d travel to Abiquiu in the Río Arriba territory of New Mexico, the tiny pueblo that Georgia O’Keeffe made famous by living there. Rivera’s eyes still widen at the memories of “primas tending woodstoves” for old-style New Mexican dinners. He’d also visit in the late summer and early fall, when all of the state stops life for a couple of weeks to harvest chile and roast it, shrouding the state in its smoky-sweet aroma.
In those days, New Mexican dishes still masqueraded as “Spanish” on the menus of respectable restaurants across the state; combo plates and tacos were still largely rumors. “You’d have two sides on the menu—Continental cuisine and ‘Spanish,’” he says. “It was rural lies—it was New Mexican food. That was the culture. It’s not like you could get away from it.”
As New Mexican food disappeared from the homes of the state’s longtime residents, their dishes became a commodity for the tourism industry. As early as the 1930s, the Fred Harvey Company offered New Mexican food in its hotels and restaurants in Santa Fe, and published “traditional” recipes in the Atchison Topeka Santa Fe Railroad magazine under its “Harvey Girls” column.14 Restaurants opened to accommodate the tourists who increasingly passed through the state, whether on the railroads or via automobile; most famous of these is La Posta in Mesilla, which opened in 1939 just a couple of miles northwest of El Paso and remains the oldest New Mexican eatery in the state.
Sedlar moved to Los Angeles in the late 1970s, working at a couple of restaurants before training at L’Ermitage, the Gallic restaurant credited with turning the city into a serious food town instead of a desert of fast food, cafeterias, and diners. He apprenticed there for a couple of years before moving on to the French-inspired Saint Estèphe in the L.A. suburb of Manhattan Beach in 1980. But the call of his homeland pushed Sedlar to try something new.
By the end of 1983, Seldar decided to follow French techniques but also incorporate ingredients from New Mexico. What emerged was sea-bass mousse tamales and salmon-jalapeño terrine. Green chile mayo and American caviar served on small blue-corn tortillas. Dishes painted in sauces to evoke the Puye cliff dwellings. It was a bold move, especially in Southern California, a region that knew a thing or two about Mexican food and lashed out against any newcomers who pretended to teach them. During the 1970s, a nouveau Mexican restaurant in Los Angeles bought hundreds of pounds of blue corn to turn into tortillas, but the results so disgusted customers—who assumed those tortillas were rotten—that the restaurant had to throw away nearly all of their blue corn.15
Saint Estèphe, however, set off a revolution. American diners were beginning to embrace regional cuisine—Cajun cooking, California cuisine, Japanese, and others. By the mid-1980s, with Mexican food firmly ensconced in the American diet but having not seen a new trend since the rise of El Torito and Chi-Chi’s in the 1970s, the spread of Southwestern cuisine was welcomed—and not just limited to New Mexico. Three years before Sedlar’s experiments, Mark Miller had spun off from the world of Alice Waters to open his Fourth Street Grill in Berkeley; its quick success on vaguely Southwestern dishes motivated him to spend the next couple of years serving as a lecturer until the 1987 opening of Coyote Café in Sedlar’s hometown. From Texas, a group of chefs—Dean Fearing, Stephan Pyles, Avner Samuel, and Robert Del Grande, with restaurant consultant Anne Lindsay Greer as their girl Friday—decided to turn Tex-Mex cuisine into a petri dish for modernist experiments and called themselves the “Gang of Five.” Greer published Cuisine of the American Southwest in 1983 to boost her self-appointed revolution; the others worked in their restaurants around Dallas and Houston creating dishes as fanciful as Sedlar’s even though Greer had little respect for the source, deriding Tex-Mex as a “mixed-up plate of rice and beans and ground beef in red chile sauce all over an enchilada.”16
The boy genius, though, remained Sedlar. America’s food critics tried to outdo themselves to praise the young chef, with Craig Clai-borne perhaps topping all write-ups by writing in 1985 that Sedlar had offered him “some of the most remarkable mixings of food styles I have ever witnessed.”17 That same year, the Gang of Five and others held a weekend conference at the Four Seasons Hotel in Houston titled the “Festival of Southwest Cookery.” Nothing particularly earth-shattering emerged from the gathering; Pyles summed it up best: “We didn’t come up with any clear-cut definition of what we are doing, but we all agree it tastes good.”18 But the resultant media attention further promoted Southwestern cuisine. By the time Sedlar’s first book, Modern Southwest Cuisine, appeared in 1987, its initial print run of twenty thousand sold out almost immediately.
Sedlar should have reigned as king for years, yet he felt something lacking. In 1989, Sedlar, Miller, and others traveled to Veracruz to learn from Patricia Quintana, a famous Mexican chef. “None of us had been to Mexico before,” Rivera recalls. “She went through all the chiles and herbs of the country. We had never used them. That’s when I realized maybe I should play around with the food of my ancestors.” Just after opening his third restaurant, Abiqui, in 1994, Sedlar left the restaurant business—“I burned out,” he acknowledges. Southwestern cuisine was already descending, anyway. The push by all the chefs in the movement to outdo themselves with nouveau takes meant that all sorts of abominations took place in the name of innovations, most with no connection at all to the Southwest—papaya salsas and the Southwestern chicken salad, a sad collection of greens, roasted corn, and chicken, the sole dish of the era (along with blue-corn tortilla chips) that survives on a nationwide scale to this day.
Rivera is surprised that the movement he helped birth and propagate went as far as it did. “It shouldn’t have gone national,” he says, “but it was a good door to Mexico. It was baby steps. It taught people that you could offer what they thought was peasant food in an upscale environment, challenge them with new dishes or interpretations of classics. When we were growing up, we ate chile and beans, but we wanted to eat chicken dinners because you thought that was better food. But as you grow up, you realize that our food is more flavorful—and it deserves all the praise in the world.”
Green surrounds the city of Hatch, at the bottom of New Mexico: fields of chiles that allow the tiny municipality to call itself the Chile Capital of the World. Water from the Rio Grande via irrigation ditches flows through it, but the town itself is dry—just a highway, small houses, and storefronts, all selling chiles by the burlap sack.
One of the most damning indicators that the Southwestern movement’s existence was ephemeral was that its practitioners didn’t fully embrace what New Mexicans actually favored above all flavors—chile. As Sedlar noted, the state comes to a standstill every fall, when farmers harvest the crop they’ve nurtured for months. After roasting, the chiles get pealed, then pulverized into powder, dried, dehydrated, diced, and freeze-dried—seemingly everything but eaten, since folks are preserving for the rest of the year. This is not a rarefied ceremony, however; New Mexico’s cult of chile is earthy, of the people, unpretentious.
“I’ve eaten it since I was wee high to a snail’s butt, and ah, it has not only counteracted the destructive elements that I have imposed upon my beautiful God-given brain, but given me a genius that I cannot account for except for the chile seed,” says Jimmy Santiago Baca, New Mexico’s most famous Chicano poet. Chile accompanies breakfast, lunch, dinner—the only debate in the state on the matter is which area grows better chiles, the most famous of which are Chimayó and Hatch. The Chimayó pepper is earthier, drier because of the height, fleshier, but Hatch’s is more prominent due to its annual Hatch Chile Festival, the southern, jovial brother to Chimayó’s sanctified pilgrimage. Come Labor Day weekend, Hatch’s population expands from a bit more than a thousand to nearly thirty thousand for a celebration of everything chile.
Attending almost yearly is Joseph Baca (no relation to Jimmy or Fabiola), a wine writer by trade. “Out of all the festivals in New Mexico I feel that this celebration honors the one characteristic that differentiates us from other states,” he says. “It’s the cultural zenith of New Mexico and honors everything that we stand for as a unique people in a very Wal-Martized America.”
The festival itself is at the municipal airport just outside town; the main festivities take place in a hangar. Across the grounds are booths selling lemonade, straightforward Mexican food, and heaping plates of New Mexico comfort: posole, smothered burritos, and fat sopaipillas. Local farmers set up stalls, displaying their harvest in all states of being—fresh, fat, and green; dried; presented in ristras; freeze-dried, wet, and shining. Dehydrated. In powder form contained in bags as small as a cell phone charger, as large as a freezer bag. The roar of propane-fueled flames envelops the field as young men dump bags into giant screen-sided roasters that tumble—some automatically, some cranked by hand—to ensure that each pepper gets properly roasted. The peppers blister after a minute, their dark green hue first turning white, then black, nearly into ash, as the sweet scent of burned chile fills the air.
Nearby, the festival continues, a country fair at its corniest. An elderly man wows the crowd by doing rope tricks with a lasso made entirely of beer cans, jumping in and out of his tin-can rope. A band blasts out country and Tex-Mex classics in English and Spanish, even though all the players are white. When the Hatch Chile Queen, a local teen, arrives in a convertible to greet her waiting subjects, her dress is decorated with red and green chiles. Of course.
A film crew sets up at the edges, readying for a special that will air on one cable show or another, but no one really cares. To get to Hatch requires commitment—either a flight to El Paso, then an eighty-mile drive, or the two-and-a-half-hour drive from Albuquerque. Will the United States come and finally follow the true New Mexican way? Probably not—but who cares? New Mexico is another country—totally Mexican, totally American, totally its own thing. It’s the Land of Enchantment, forgotten and everlasting.
Besides, Americans always toss aside the Mexican food we once loved. Just look at what’s happening to Tex-Mex.