University of New Mexico UNM Digital Repository History ETDs Electronic Theses and Dissertations Winter 11-14-2017 Fruit, Fiber, and Fire: A Cultural History of Modern Agriculture in New Mexico William R. Carleton University of New Mexico Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalrepository.edu/hist_etds Part of the History Commons Recommended Citation Carleton, William R. "Fruit, Fiber, and Fire: A Cultural History of Modern Agriculture in New Mexico.edu/hist_etds/209 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Electronic Theses and Dissertations at UNM Digital Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in History ETDs by an authorized administrator of UNM Digital Repository.
For more information, please contact disc@unm. William Randall Carleton Candidate History Department This dissertation is approved, and it is acceptable in quality and form for publication: Approved by the Dissertation Committee: Dr. Virginia Scharff, Chairperson Dr. Samuel Truett Dr.
Luis Campos Dr. Jared Farmer i FRUIT, FIBER, AND FIRE: A CULTURAL HISTORY OF MODERN AGRICULTURE IN NEW MEXICO by WILLIAM RANDALL CARLETON B., History, Bates College, 2005 M., History, The University of New Mexico, 2011 DISSERTATION Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy History The University of New Mexico Albuquerque, New Mexico December 2017 ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS A long list of people have helped me enormously throughout this process. First, thank you to my dissertation committee and especially to Dr. I owe all the members of the Food Across Borders symposium, sponsored by the William P.
Clements Center for Southwest Studies at Southern Methodist University, a large debt of gratitude for their input on Chapter Five. I would also like to thank the members of the 2015 Western History Dissertation Workshop hosted at Yale University, and the members of the 2015 Workshop on the History of the Environment, Agriculture, Technology, and Science hosted at the University of Colorado-Boulder, who all provided challenging insight for chapters 1 and 2, respectively. I am thankful for all the help from archivists at the Center for Southwest Research, at NMSU, and at the New Mexico Farm and Ranch Heritage Museum, and for Dr. Deborah Fitzgerald, who provided comments on what became chapter three for a panel on at 2016 American Society for Environmental History annual meeting in Chicago.
I am also highly thankful for the support of the Dorothy Woodward Memorial Fellowship, which allowed me to focus a year on my dissertation research. I certainly owe a thank you to Gordon Tooley, who spent a fruitful day early in my research planting trees, talking apples, and sharing articles from his personal library with me, and to Marisa Thompson, who let me crash in her guestroom for all those research visits to Las Cruces. I am grateful to all my friends, who supported me by both talking about history and by talking about anything but history. Most of all, I am grateful for my family, who helped me along in too many ways to count.
iii Fruit, Fiber, and Fire: A Cultural History of Modern Agriculture in New Mexico By William Randall Carleton B. History, Bates College, 2005 M. History, University of New Mexico, 2011 PhD History ABSTRACT In New Mexico, no crops have defined the people and their landscape in the industrial era more than apples, cotton, and chile. They illustrate, more than any other three crops in twentieth-century New Mexico, how agriculture has spurred migrations of plants and people, and in turn, shaped the culture of the place.
The physical origins, the shifting cultural meanings, and the environmental and market requirements of these three iconic plants all broadly point to the convergence in New Mexico of diverse regional attitudes toward industry in agriculture. These three crops, all industrialized at different times in the twentieth century and in very different ways, in turn help illuminate New Mexico’s long and fraught relationship with modernity. As this dissertation illustrates, for much of the twentieth century modernization did not simply radiate from cities into its hinterlands; rather, the broad project of modernity, and resistance to it, has often originated in farm fields, at agricultural festivals, and in agrarian stories. iv A central premise to this investigation is that there is neither a single form of industrial agriculture nor a single form of traditional agriculture; rather, many ever- changing approaches of agriculture have often existed in tandem, often influencing each other in surprising ways.
Through examining how various approaches to agriculture have relied upon, benefited from, or challenged each other, simple dichotomies between industrial and non-industrial agriculture disappear. In their place emerges a more nuanced portrait of an ever-changing, creative agricultural landscape that defies teleological narratives of inevitable and ever-increasing resource and labor exploitation that often accompany discussions of agricultural industrialization. Agricultural industrialization in the twentieth century, this dissertation shows, followed a nonlinear and highly contingent path. v TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION.1 APPLES CHAPTER 1: BEFORE THERE WERE ALIENS, THERE WERE APPLES: MYTHS, MOTHS, AND MODERNITY IN NEW MEXICO’S EARLY COMMERCIAL ORCHARDS.14 The Cosmopolitan Fruit .16 The Land of the Big Red Apple .20 The Reordered Landscape.27 The Industrial Pest .30 The Apple as a Cultural Colonizer.54 CHAPTER 2: PATENT LIES, THE “PEOPLE’S BUSINESS,” AND THE MODERN CORE OF NORTHERN NEW MEXICO AGRICULTURE, 1940– 1980.57 How to Catch a Fish with an Apple .59 Tanks in the Mountains and War on Poverty in the Orchards .72 vi COTTON CHAPTER 3: THE SHIFTING SUBJECTS OF A SOUTHWEST KING: COTTON, AGRICULTURAL INDUSTRIALIZATION, AND MIGRATIONS IN THE INTERWAR NEW MEXICO BORDERLANDS.88 King Cotton in the Industrial West .93 The Tyranny of Homogeneity.99 The Acala Borderlands .109 Reorientations of Industrial Cotton.115 CHAPTER 4: DIVERSIFICATION, PATERNALISM, AND THE TRANSNATIONAL THREADS OF COTTON IN SOUTHERN NEW MEXICO: THE INDUSTRIAL IDEAL AT WORK AT STAHMANN FARMS, 1926– 1970.117 Mid-Century Diversification and the Modern Goose .127 Food, Fiestas, and the Transnational Threads .133 The Contingent Ideal.139 CHILE vii CHAPTER 5: CROSSING CHILES, CROSSING BORDERS: DR.
FABIÁN GARCÍA, THE NEW MEXICO CHILE PEPPER, AND MODERNITY IN THE EARLY TWENTIETH-CENTURY US-MEXICO BORDERLANDS .143 CHAPTER 6: THE EVOLUTION OF A MODERN POD: THE INDUSTRIAL CHILE AND ITS STORYTELLERS IN NEW MEXICO .165 The Growth of an Industry .166 Promotional Stints and “A New Cuisine for ‘Modern Civilization’” .170 The Evolution of the Modern Pod .175 The Fire of Rebellion .182 A Twentieth-First Century Pepper: Hatch, Chile Nativo, and the GMO that Wasn’t .187 The Ever-evolving Pod .202 viii Introduction Ten years ago, in the fall of 2007, I cleared out an overgrown half-acre of willows, elms, and various annual weeds twenty miles north of Albuquerque, and planted a few rows of garlic that I planned to sell the following summer. Though full of energy, earnestness, and enthusiasm, I lacked an intimate knowledge of the landscape and faced a steep learning curve on how to grow vegetables there. Over the course of several sweaty months and years, I eventually expanded the garden and learned the ins and outs of managing a small farm business. As I sought to learn how to grow vegetables in the arid climate, my mind often wandered to the region’s agricultural history.
How have other farmers done it? What did they grow, and why? Though I gleaned what I could from a small number of lay books, I could not find a scholarly history of recent commercial agriculture in New Mexico that could answer many of my questions. This project, in part, sprung from the seed of that quest. My hope is that within these pages lie some useful details for local farmers and local food advocates, that I provide some kindling for their further research, and that I offer them an overall sense of how rich and diverse an agricultural history this region has experienced over the long twentieth century. This dissertation, however, strives to tell a history that will interest many more people than just the curious farmers out there.
My intended audience goes well beyond the farming community to include are all those interested in the broader cultural and environmental history of the twentieth-century New Mexico borderlands and how that history fits into even broader national and global narratives. To uncover some of this 1 history, I examined various angles of the state’s agricultural past and, specifically, decided to focus on three crops that have long histories in the state: apples, cotton, and chile. At the core of my decision to hone in on specific crops is my conviction that to understand the history of a people, we must understand the history of the plants that sustain them. In New Mexico, no crops have defined the people and their landscape in the industrial era more than apples, cotton, and chile.
They illustrate, more than any other three crops in twentieth-century New Mexico, how agriculture has spurred migrations of plants and people, and in turn, shaped the culture of the place. The physical origins, the shifting cultural meanings, and the environmental and market requirements of these three iconic plants all broadly point to the convergence in New Mexico of larger regions—the Mexican North, the American Northeast, and the American South—and the convergence of diverse regional attitudes toward industry in agriculture. These three crops, all industrialized at different times in the twentieth century and in very different ways, in turn help illuminate New Mexico’s long and fraught relationship with modernity. As this dissertation illustrates, for much of the twentieth century modernization did not simply radiate from cities into its hinterlands; rather, the broad project of modernity, and resistance to it, has often originated in farm fields, at agricultural festivals, and in agrarian stories.
This historical examination of apples, chile, and cotton in New Mexico helps illuminate the many, and often surprising, ways that New Mexicans have embraced, eschewed, appropriated, or fought modernity over the long twentieth century. 2 Many recent monographs have focused on a diverse array of crops, from corn to wheat, bananas to pecans, all over the world. The best of these have illustrated, to varying degrees, the co-productive relationships between agricultural production and consumption, the role of culture in shaping the natural world, the ways crops can both reify and defy borders, and the complex consequences a single plant can have on a landscape and society.1 Several historians have emphasized how crops, as they become icons, embody myths of the people who cultivate, consume, and celebrate them. William Thomas Okie argues that the Georgia peach, for example, “is at the center of a myth, an imaginative pattern, a belief-embodying, meaning-shaping history”; and Cindy Ott explains how the ubiquitous Halloween pumpkin became a site where “the American agrarian myth.”2 This dissertation draws from the many useful approaches these histories provide to offer its own unique contribution by examining in depth the interdependencies and relationships between industrial and non-industrial systems.
These crops, their farmers and their attendant industries, together reveal an agricultural and cultural history of New Mexico that sheds new light on New Mexicans’ relationship to modernity, race, nation, and the environment. 1 For a few examples of exemplary commodity histories, see Sterling Evans, Bound in Twine: The History and Ecology of the Henequen-Wheat for Mexico and the American and Canadian Plains, 1880-1950 (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2007); Mark Kurlansky, Salt: A World History (New York: Walker and Company, 2002); Sidney Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York: Viking, 1985); Douglas Cazaux Sackman, Orange Empire: California and the Fruits of Eden (Berkeley: University of California, 2005); and John Soluri, Banana Cultures: Agriculture, Consumption and Environmental Change in Honduras and the United States (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005). 2 William Thomas Okie, The Georgia Peach: Culture, Agriculture, and Environment in the American South (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 2; and Cindy Ott, Pumpkin: The Curious History of An American Icon (Seattle: The University of Washington Press, 2012), 6. Philip Pauly, Fruits and Plains: The Horticultural Transformation of America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007), and Jared Farmer, Trees in Paradise: A California History (New York: W.