Toward a Poetics of Chile…in Another Mexico

It snuck up from behind me—that whiff of smoldering weeds, and then the tickle that comes just before coughing. A breeze had again wafted that charred aroma to the middle of the street, all the way from the kitchen window my mom had opened to vent the smoke of chile de árbol pods twisting like burgundy claws on her cast iron griddle. Standing arms-length from her griddle she used as a comal for baking tortillas and toasting spices, she held a dishcloth over mouth and nose to protect herself from fumes strong enough to drive pets away.

I did not need to see that scene to see it, or hear my grandfather’s voice to imagine men staggering, choking on the chile bushes Francisco Villa’s troops burned just inside the cave’s mouth to smoke out his enemies. In the distance, I saw a firing squad, a puff of smoke, and men crumple. Such was that aroma’s power in the early 1960s: these sensations could already interrupt my play with a sudden invasion of appetite and memories.

Moments earlier, I might have imagined the adventures of the tiny plastic chess piece I held in my hand—the Black Knight galloping on his steed as I paced my chalk-drawn square waiting for the next throw of dice to tumble to my feet. The numbers the dice thrower rolled told us how many squares we could advance on the giant board game we had etched into the asphalt with shards of broken drywall scavenged from sheetrock that slid from the freight cars on the Southern Pacific tracks that paralleled the San Gabriel River, the northern limit of our 1950s-era housing tract. We dragged the shards back to our cul-de-sac on Summerfield Street after we got tired of rolling discarded water heaters down the causeway that lifted Slauson Boulevard over the river. Its steep slope was as good as a hillside when it came to the way gravity made old water heaters fly apart in pieces.

Not more than a half-hour earlier, the younger boys had passed the time scratching edgy battle scenes, harsh dashes marking machine gun fire, on the blank sheet of our dead-end street; the girls drew a single hopscotch cross. We must have tired of drawing and skipping because someone decided to add new squares to the cross. We joined in, adding segment to irregular segment. Then someone ran inside to retrieve a game token, a tiny tin shoe or jalopy from a ransacked Monopoly set. Some argued over rules; others broke off to draw more squares, pursuing a logic they did not bother to share. Others huddled around the start box that had appeared, rolling dice to decide who would go first. Several throws later, I found myself marooned in a poison square, waiting for a pair of sixes to release me.

None of us expected a winner. We strove for the surprise of stepping into the next square. Our caprices animated a twisting invertebrate that coupled with itself until it swarmed all over our cul-de-sac, the closest thing to a Commons the developers of our housing tract never planned for. We were too absorbed in world-making, in ontology as play, to ask where the drywall was going, or remember that two boulevards, a train line, and a freeway scorched the air we breathed. We cared only for the next throw of dice, the surprise in the next square: perhaps a slide to another branch of the maze, a devouring monster. We could not have explained what we were doing; we didn’t need to. The grownups let us rule our dead-end, and the abandoned lot and river beyond until sunset.

Our jumbled rules came from a jumbled neighborhood, one left over from development surges that had erased the citrus, avocado, olive orchards, and dairies that once carpeted our southeastern quadrant of Los Angeles County. Whittier’s suburbs had edged south, toward my neighborhood; the Ford Motor plant across the river fed the northward sprawl. Working-class families moved in when new homes filled in the space between river and freeway. First-generation Polish immigrants now settled next to Italian Americans from New York, next to third-generation Mexican Americans from East L.A. because the legal walls of housing covenants and redlining had begun to crumble. Our world-making lasted only a few days. I remember my disappointment, and then awe, when an early drizzle blurred the game’s chalk lines, turning words and stick figures into fuzzy glyphs.

Chile aromas overpowering my appetite for play was common in a neighborhood where many families cooked Mexican food, and where my playmates loved my mother’s cooking. I realized this when they would follow me into the kitchen and stare at her as she decorated a platter of sopes until she understood. “Would you like to taste one,” she asked. They meekly nodded yes. We walked back to the street, biting into our crispy corn-dough disks with bared teeth so as not to topple its peak of shredded cabbage, sliced radishes, and diced tomato on a foundation of longaniza, a piquant, vinegary crumbled pork loin sausage. A drizzling of garlicy and sour tomatillo chile de árbol salsa, dusted with tangy, salty crumbled queso cotija completed these miniature mountains of flavor and textural contrast.

Even then, several varieties of capsicum annum—the world’s most widely cultivated of the five domesticated species—ruled the flavors of cooking on my street. Smuggling distance from Tijuana, and California’s agricultural bounty, plus a built-in immigrant market resulting from almost two centuries of Mexican settlement, ensured a good selection. With some hunting, my mother could stock her kitchen with guajillos shaped like burnished rosewood daggers, and deep ochre cascabeles, so named because their seeds turned the round dried pods into rattles. They also presented themselves as jade green and crimson-tinged serranos and jalapeños, plump yellow hueritos, the lustrous, grass-colored hues of six-inch New Mexican chiles piled high in the bed of the pick-up hauled in from New Mexico.

Unlike the industrial uniformity of the supermarket Russet, our appetite for chile required variety and specifiers, such as chipotle, if we did not want to ruin a recipe or confuse it with the South American country. Its verb, enchilar, describes the process by which a tortilla becomes an enchilada, or enchilado, when someone is inflamed with anger. A chilar means a patch for growing chiles. We had no use for chili, though it came closest to its Nahuatl pronunciation, or the word “hot.” We said picoso, from the verb “picar,” to sting. Sophisticated grownups said picosidad when they wanted a concept to gauge its intensities. And my mother’s cooking skill had led us to believe that a meal without it was not a meal. The ultimate palace of that desire was a Grand Central Market stall specializing in dried chiles. I would press my nose against the glass displays, which, from my height seemed like walls of differently shaped, textured, and shades of burgundy, a cabinet of curiosities that filled the air with their pungent aromas. Because of the Spanish reading and writing lessons my parents required of me each Saturday I could pronounce their names, chile puya, chile ancho, pasilla negro, imagining what each tasted like, until asking my father, Manuel, “How do you prepare these?” If he was not in a hurry, he might rattle off a dish or two, this kind of chile for that kind of mole, dull green pumpkin seeds for the pipian. At home, my sisters and I helped prepare the salsa cacera, fire-roasted serrano, onion, garlic, tomato, ground in the stone mortar and pestle, a molcajete y mano when my mother worked the night shift at the Shopping Bag in Pico Rivera. If fresh produce ran low, my father scavenged my mother’s stash of dried Chile California left over from Christmas tamale season, toasting them whole in a dab of manteca until blackened and broken into big shards for scooping up refried beans dusted with queso fresco.

My chile tolerance grew with my desire to imitate the grownups and explore my mostly working-class suburb. My discoveries and acquired tastes had everything to do with my immigrant family’s paternal and maternal branches, practically a village because they had lived in and around the Canta Ranas barrio of today’s Santa Fe Springs since the 1920s. There they collectively educated my senses with the perfume of tropical fruit trees they smuggled across the border, the goats and calves raised for slaughter on my uncle’s dairy, the plants they foraged from the San Gabriel River, the trees they planted, their gluttonous custom of recalling recipes before a meal had ended. Their appetites also informed me of losses too painful to forget, which they related in stories of wild places, memories that pulled them back to the plains, mountains, and cities they had left behind, arrivals so recent they had not yet lost the habit of extravagant feasting, and hunger for the freshest foods their ranches and farms had once provisioned. The diaspora that sharpened their appetites also enlisted their ranching expertise.

Los Angeles, the fastest-growing early twentieth-century U.S. city, needed a dairy industry to quench its thirst for milk, and skilled Mexican workers to run their dairies in the pastures that ringed the suburbs. Their poorly paid jobs supplied them with calves to fatten and enough money to buy or build their first houses in the barrios. Their cramped yards gave them just enough room for rabbit hutches and chicken coops, fruit trees and grape vines, tomatoes, squash, corn, sunflowers, edible cacti, Old and New World herbs. My maternal grandmother, Matilde, re-created the irrigated fields she left behind in the plains of northwest Chihuahua. She filled a large garden plot with the New Mexican strain, the so-called Anaheim chiles, and then taught my mother to roast, peel and dry the green strips of chile seco pasado, just as her mother had to prepare for winter. Their restlessness turned their former Mexican interior patios inside out, transplanting their crowded tropical thorn forests to their suburban front yards.

But I would have returned a blank stare if you had asked me to explain the aromas wafting from mother’s kitchen. I did not have a clear idea how my mother had mastered western Mexico’s cuisine, Chihuahua’s ranch cooking, Baja California’s norte’s seafood, or the American fare she learned in a Downey High School home economics class. I did not yet glimpse the connection between the hardships her family had endured as dairy and garment workers and the whole grains and beans they cooked; nor did I understand that my mother’s love of cooking stemmed, in part, from a Cinderella-like relationship with her mother. She prepared the meals, baked stacks of thick, Chihuahua-styled tortillas de harina while her mother rode the bus back and forth from a downtown sweat shop. Nor did I understand how my admiration for these elder time travelers competed with the stifling conformity Richard Nixon’s suburbs demanded of its outsiders. For reasons I struggled to grasp, my elders took a perverse pleasure in keeping a cool distance from the world I wanted to embrace. They enjoyed it, engaged it, translated it back to themselves, candidly discussed strategies for living inside that generous paranoid beast. But their skepticism made me hover between worlds. They were not born wary, however. They had all lived lives that hoped for other futures, lands, scents, sounds, and flavors they never planned on losing.

One of my earliest memories of this practice occurred in the late 1950s when Alfredo and Matilde decided to retaste the barbacoas they had enjoyed in Chihuahua before being exiled by revolution. Their eldest son provided the pretext—the lamb he would raise for Easter. I joined the preparations, watching my father dig the barbacoa pit in my grandfather’s backyard. Their recipe was another matter. All I can attest to is what I saw and touched when I helped trim the sharp, thorn-like teeth from the edges of the wide blue-gray swords my father cut from a large Agave Americana expansa growing in the backyard. Though introduced to Southern California as an ornamental, my uncle Teofilo, an experienced maguey tapper from Zapotlanejo, Jalisco, taught me that this variety could be forced to grow large enough to extract pulque by removing the energy-sucking rhizomes this strain is known for (Figure 1). Making the leaves easier to handle indicated a Native technology found throughout the agave growing regions of Central, Eastern, and Western Mexico as far south as Oaxaca. For me, however, trimming the leaves made the experience memorable. Except for the lamb’s slaughter, which they did not allow me to witness, they let me inspect each step of the doing and tasting.

I remember the bustle in the middle of my grandmother’s black- and white-tiled kitchen, the burgundy sheen of red chiles my mother ground in the blender; the sides of lamb rubbed with spices and chile paste before placing inside sturdy linen envelopes my grandmother had sewn and attached to wire hooks to hang over the pit’s mouth from a steel pipe to prevent the glowing avocado and citrus embers from scorching the meat. These envelopes were then girded with the maguey leaves that would impregnate the meat with sweet, roasted agave-scented steam; they placed chicken wire and the stainless-steel bowl under the meat and over the coals to catch the dripping meat juices. The second charcoal and hardwood fire they lit in the middle of the steel sheet that covered the pit applied heat from above. Soon after, my aunts and uncles began their tequila-drinking vigil, bringing out their guitars to sing Mexican and country ballads late into the night. I remember waking up the next morning to inhale the aroma of lamb, roasted agave, Mexican orégano, cumin, garlic, and chiles; the warm, pliable flour tortilla my mother had baked to cradle the meat’s juices; my surprise that the taste was better than the smoky fragrance I inhaled; flesh cooked so slowly it had turned white, juices laced with herbs and chile in each thick slice my father stacked on my plate.

The education of my senses continued when I accompanied my father to my aunt’s modest tract home across the San Gabriel River to deliver the jewelry he had repaired for her. My impression of that moment begins with her opening the door, her corpulent figure snugly fitted in a silk dress, enveloped in a cloud of aromas and the strains of a luscious Puccini aria playing on her stereo. Making our way to the kitchen, I fused these sensations with the tall, lacquered vases and tanned leather and cedar equipales she had arrayed before an ebony screen. She approved of my father’s repairs, and, at some point, told us how she drove away an ex-husband from her back door by blowing the finest pequin dust into his eyes to send him off cursing. She told her story slyly as she crumbled the thick nixtamal cordon with which she had sealed in the steam from the wide mouth of a ten-gallon galvanized milk canister that rattled precariously on her stove’s burner. An aroma of young kid, long simmered at the lowest possible flame, filled her kitchen while I anticipated what it would taste like, a birria de olla that reminded me of my grandfather’s pit roasted barbacoa. Her cooking technique guaranteed the meat’s fall-off-the bone tenderness in a tangy, slightly gamey consommé laced with cinnamon, allspice, roasted agave, and bold guajillo flavors she ladled into a pair of bowls. Although she had prepared the birria for her son, whose arrival she expected at any minute, the generosity with which she shared it told me, this is where we come from, even if I could not yet find that place on a map. She placed fresh tortillas de maíz directly over a burner while inviting me to sprinkle finely diced white onion, cilantro, a squirt of lime, and the mineral bite of crushed piquín in my bowl. My father showed me how to make a taco with the succulent threads of goat meat suffused with the subtle flavor of agave leaf my aunt had placed in her canister turned slow-cooker. My introduction to the piquín, a wild annum as small as a finch’s beak, stood out for me because its heat, registering as much as 150,000 units on the Scoville piquancy scale, dissipates so quickly. She thus imprinted me with the wild flavor local farmers and Native communities still harvest from under the Western Sierra Madre’s tree-shaded hackberry thickets, and the metallic, citrusy-tasting guajillo, now tractor-cultivated in the El Bajío plateau that straddles the states of Jalisco, Aguas Calientes, Guanajuato, and Querétaro.

Later, in the 1970s, I delved deeper into my family’s ranching past when I agreed to take over the twice-daily milking of my late friend, Stephen Schack’s, herd of Sonoma nannies. I did this on a few occasions when he needed to take brief holidays with his girlfriend or take his prize-winning nannies to the Sacramento County Fair. Keeping my word helped me to remind Stephen, a few years later, to set aside a French Alpine doe as a wedding gift, and soon-to-be matriarch of a micro-herd my wife, Mary, and I raised in South Whittier, a neighborhood of half-acre plots in the shadow of oil refineries fittingly called Billy Goat Acres. The steady supply of milk and meat compelled a consultation with my mother for her cheese, cajeta and birria-making expertise. About a year later, we began to liquidate our five or six goats, a pair of lambs, plus a year-and-half old Black Angus calf. I delivered one of the kids to my uncle Larry’s barbacoa pit in Santa Barbara (Figure 2); we sent the others to freezers or prepared them for parties Mary and I orchestrated for family and colleagues.

The vividness of those flavors and their place-associations survived in my neural networks because I had made a conscious effort to preserve them, and because my training in anthropology prepared me to recognize the farming and cooking expertise nested in my family and friends. More than a decade later, those practices, which I continue to this day, began to coalesce in Recipe of Memory: Five Generations of Mexican Cuisine (The New Press, 1995), a social history of the more than 250 circa 1888 family recipes my wife, Mary, and I began to explore before I entered graduate school in 1980. Indeed, recent neuroscience suggests how the emotional rewards of such skill acquisition—the sensory and social pleasures of preparing, tasting, and sharing delicious food, the primal satisfaction of hunger, and the sense of accomplishment gained from technical mastery—restructures specific regions of the expert brain to encode exponentially more knowledge than the novice (Debarnot et al. 2014; Delon-Martin et al. 2014; Schwenkreis et al.: 2007; Van Overschelde, et al. 2005; Rawson and Van Overschelde 2004). My challenge in writing my next book, therefore, would be to conduct a thought experiment that asked how the sensory richness of my own lived experiences could serve as a pathway to theorizing an aesthetics of culinary art gleaned from everyday life.

To be clear, I did not weave these anecdotes to prove the infallibility of my memories. Memories developed from artistic mastery inevitably involve the pruning that consolidate the distortions that make them memorable, a process all too easily dismissed as too subjective without considering the neuroscience that underlies them. No, my intention was to first create a post-disciplinary space where aesthetic philosophy and neurosciences could communicate without nullifying each other, and then to identify the metaphors derived from my chile-eating experiences.

Although culture’s powerful role in filtering perception may seem awfully abstract at first glance, consider how the Mexican parent who threatens to rub a drop of jalapeño vinegar on a child’s fingertips to discourage nail biting relies on such a coding distinction, which is what my father prescribed for my sister’s habit. In that setting, the threat tells the child to experience pain as punishment, not a condiment. A chile’s appearance at the dinner table, however, signals a transformation that reveals the paradoxical role of social enculturation in the formation of acquired tastes. A culinary culture supplies us with a language for identifying beauty and pleasure, as well as the barbarous other. Like any other coded language, a cuisine tests and revises the rules that govern our taste preferences, the rules of the mixable, the boundary between wilderness and civilization. Contrary to that code’s abstract connotations, however, culinary systems are not universal: each emerges from a society already in conversation with a specific geography, ecology, and economy. The contrasting threads of that culinary conversation thus resemble a loom that we, its weavers, unknowingly set in motion when we interpret our chile-eating experiences. When assisted by millions of immigrants this loom materially re-arranges a city’s built and imagined landscapes. The tortillerías, panaderías, the Mexican restaurants, and the variety of produce now sold in farmers’ markets, the tender nopales, quelites, and pápalo herb growing between Los Angeles freeways, testify to a cuisine’s power to revitalize abandoned urban landscapes.

But I had a problem, one that required me to understand the role metaphors play in expressing the sensations of chile-eating if I hoped to extrapolate a poetics from those experiences. That quest meant going beyond journalistic description and conventional literary definitions to imagine how its day-to-day performances occur in specific Anthropocene ecologies. Reasoning as a sensory ethnographer would allow me to approach a place—my small suburban world on Summerfield Street—a remembered time—the repressive 1950s continued in the early 1960s—and my mother’s cooking—as different threads of a cultural fabric. Advances in the neuroscience of chile-eating next focused my attention on its most obvious sensations. Its burning not only tells you that you have a body, if charged with sufficient emotion the sensation also becomes memorably linked to the unique time and setting in which it is experienced. Cultural knowledge thus haunts the way we interpret sensations, stretches its ontological fabric in advance of our enunciating arrival to reinforce the cultural codes and social relations with which we transmit that knowledge to the next generation.

Like a cave midden, a cuisine’s weave of ecology and culture can trap many things, including the residues of figurative language, in the routines of day-to-day living. And like an heirloom recipe, that weave tells us how to summon, if not the dead, then a piece of that ancestor’s world in a séance of simulated sensations made more convincing because we see it, feel it, and taste it. The domesticated capsicums—annuum and pubescens in Mesoamerica; frutescens, baccatum, and chinense in South America—therefore open the pathways to the poetics of fire. In Mesoamerica, that adventure began when ancient American hunter-gatherers began collecting, and inadvertently domesticating wild capsicum annuums, the world’s most widely cultivated of the five domesticated chile species. That trial-and-error experiment may have begun as early as 7,500 Bc in the Eastern Sierra Madre ranges that stretch southeast through Southern Puebla, northern Oaxaca, and southern Veracruz, and not, as once supposed, in the Tehuacán Valley where maize was first domesticated. The greater frequency of wild chiles and domesticated varieties found in the Eastern Sierra Madre, together with warmer growing conditions, and the earliest, 6,500-year-old word for chile coined by the ancestors of today’s Zapotec and Mixtec speakers, confirm that region as the epicenter of c. annuum domestication (Buckler, Thornsberry and Kresovich 2001; Perry and Flannery 2007; Kraft et al. 2014). Recent Smithsonian archaeological investigations of a pair of Oaxaca caves allow us to imagine the next chapters in that domesticating saga. Dating back at least 1,700 years, the seven different chile varieties and stone implements sifted from the cave floors demonstrate a remarkable continuity with present-day Mexican cooks. We can imagine the scrape and clack of chiles ground in shallow stone troughs in which they macerated green or red ripened chiles for their stews or sauces. “You don’t grow seven different kinds of chiles unless you’re cooking some pretty interesting food,” excavation analyst Linda Perry said (Smithsonian 2007).

The annuums not only established their place in the Mesoamerican milpa’s symbiotic relations (maize, beans, squash, tomatoes, amaranth, etc.), their variety inspired a host of metaphors, narratives, and technologies. But we have yet to hear a full account of how these chiles acquired their meanings, nor should it surprise us that the European conquest of the Americas not only destroyed Native populations but also it profoundly disrupted the ability of Native societies to transmit their knowledge into the so-called modern age. Subsequent capitalist settler conquests would accelerate the rending of Native knowledge fabrics without completely unraveling them. They still speak from their eco-places, and from within their chile-eating practices. A poetics of chile should therefore allow us to re-imagine all its contexts, from the earliest American ecologies of domestication and earliest city-states to the present-day disruptions of forced migration. Such a poetics would also need to account for my attachments to my neighborhood, the society that complicated my experience of national belonging, and the borders that maintain the immigrant as a renewable resource of cheap labor. It should acknowledge the dualities of pleasure and pain, remembering and forgetting, the echo of past creations in the rituals of chile-eating.

It turns out my ambivalent place has an address and a name. Queer, LatinX cultural critic Gloria Anzaldúa called it Nepantla, her re-imagined Nahuatl concept of the middle place, the perilous in-betweenness the Mexican immigrant experiences when crossing the barbed-wired fence to el norte’s hostile paradise (Anzaldúa 1993). A poetics of Nepantla would therefore understand the vast material and imaginary places of the desert Southwest where Indigenous and colonizing cultures meet to create regionally distinct hybrid cuisines. It’s a poetics that would not only resist the belief that European conquest had irrevocably destroyed pre-Hispanic memory and question the nationalist inertia that reduces Nepantla’s vast hybridity to a simplistic Aztec and Spanish binary; it also would frame Nepantla’s diversity in terms of Native eco-relational metaphors whose ontological weave draws from many Europes, Africas and Asias, and, obviously, many Native Americas because no nation completely controls the combinatory of borderlands culture. Anzaldúa indeed gave an ecological nod to a Nepantla subject that enacts the posthuman relational weave of human and nonhuman entities, writing, “When perpetual conflict erodes a sense of connectedness and wholeness la nepantlera calls on the ‘connectionist’ faculty to show the deep common ground and interwoven kinship among all things and people. This faculty, one of less-structured thoughts, less rigid categorizations, and thinner boundaries, allows us to picture—via reverie, dreaming, and artistic creativity—similarities instead of solid divisions” (2002: 568).

In Nepantla and elsewhere, the aesthetic logic of chile-eating is synesthesia—the juxtaposition of different orders of sensory knowledge to express our sense memories. While taste buds alert us to flavors the nose identifies, our eyes and ears consume the table’s landscape and heady conversation of wine and friends. Few other art forms are as thoroughly synesthetic as the dining experience when its envelopes us in a cloud of sensations and meanings. Writers who send dispatches from that country often resort to the symphony of flavors metaphor. This foodie cliché equates the atmospheres of taste with an engrossing sound to express the dissolution of the body’s limits, and the time before, during, and after pleasure consumes us. We thus experience synesthesia in poetry as a corporeal atmosphere, “a kind of embodied space,” Timothy Morton argues, an experience suggested by the term “ambience” (Morton 2007: 93).

Smell, Morton writes, is this drama’s most powerful ambient agent: It “is associated both with pungency of the corporeal and with the intangibility of the mental,” the je ne sais quoi of the “unattainable object of desire.” A smell is also a presence that moves, an “atmosphere and something emerging from an atmosphere” (Morton 2006: 220). Atmospheres have volume, a sensory space–time fabric we discover in the involuntary memory that interrupts whatever we were thinking before an aroma immerses us in another sensorium of meanings and memories. The taste, touch, and sounds that trail an aroma extend the duration and depth of its aura. Chile’s pungency, however, takes its “ambient” qualities to the sensory limit. With violence or subtlety, just a hint of it can open an aperture from which to summons shards of place memory, or to make a new, unforgettable memory, as the gastronome and playwright Paco Ignacio Taibo I (late father of the eponymously named and beloved Mexican hardboiled detective novelist) expressed in his reminiscence of a mole-tasting visit to Oaxaca:

Those who indulge chile-eating as thrill-seeking may imagine it as a dangerous immersion we anticipate in that first bite of the angriest habanero. Though this minor terror warns us, “watch out, it’s hot,” we dive in, thrilled to discover if we can master that trial. For Walter Benjamin, the experience of sensory envelopment is key. Whether stimulus of involuntary memory or shock of an experience that produces a new memory, a pleasurable or disgusting taste breaks the outward-looking habit of scanning our visual field to remind us that we are already inside the orb of our subjectivity (Novero 2010), and hence the need for a synesthetic language to express emotions we can taste, touch, and hear yet hardly see.

Paradoxically, however, a chile-eating experience is more than metaphorical because its piquant messaging and bright colors were never meant for human mouths. Capsicum piquancy evolved to insult small mammalian mouths, while its bright crimsons evolved to attract the avian eye. Birds cannot taste capsaicin, but they can see its ripe fruits and smell the vanilloid compounds of wild chiles when flying over the jungle canopy. Rats, dogs, and pigs will eat chile-laced foods only when deprived of other choices (Pickersgill 2008; Dunn and Sanchez 2021). The bird’s ability to see attractive shades of red and the mammal’s blindness to that color and aversion to chile-induced pain indicate the ways wild chilies select for birds; their digestive tracts, which soften chile seed coats, prepare them for germination. (Nabhan 1985) The capsaicin compounds that give us the sensation of piquancy are there to trick the heat-sensing nerves buried in our mammalian taste buds to signal that they have passed the threshold at which heat begins to induce pain. David Julius and other molecular biologists have confirmed this chemical trickery when they isolated the four proteins, known as TRPV1, embedded in the nerve channel that transmits the signal for heat, pain, and certain toxins (Figures 3 & 4). That nerve receptor, which cannot detect flavor, is nested deep in that flower-like array of nerves otherwise known as a taste bud. That receptor’s location, which probably obeys the evolutionary logic of an early warning system for noxious foods, is not unique. Its network of pain receptors and nerve channels, which carry the ion impulses that transmit pain messages to the brain, are scattered throughout the body. And not just human ones: we share the DNA of this ancient heat-sensing mechanism with earth worms. Stranger still, its four-part protein, Mexican neuro-scientist Tamara Rosenbaum explains, twists the nerve channel open and shut like a camera’s lens shutter, but only if a capsaicin molecule lodges in exactly the right place on its intricately shaped protein. When it does, the ion impulse that messages heat passes through to tell the brain to release substance P, a neuropeptide that transmits a pain signal to the central nervous system and to direct pain-killing endorphins to that nerve ending. That cascade of events then triggers vassal constriction, accelerated heartbeat, salivation, watery eyes, and the serotonin re-uptake cycles that produce tiny increments of euphoria. Continued capsaicin exposures eventually cause this molecule to shut off the nerve channel and stop further releases of substance P until numbness sets in (Cooney and Molteni, 2022; Ferreira and Faria, 2016).

Because this scenario desensitizes the mouth’s TRPV1 pain receptors, a fascinating change in taste perception occurs, at least for veteran chile-eaters. Unlike the novice, whose experience of pain will blunt taste perception, the veteran’s refractory period between pain, numbing, and a return to equilibrium occurs more quickly. Rapid cycling from pain to no-pain allows for the meal’s peaks of exaltation as it enhances the way we perceive sweetness (Colegio Nacional 2015). This cycling effect explains why lifelong chile-eaters claim that the fruit “le da sabor a la comida” (“makes food flavorful”), and also the Mexican and Asian preparations, such as candied, chile-saturated mangoes on a stick, which combine sweetness and saltiness with piquancy. These synesthetic sensations take us to the cultural/neurochemical borderland of chile-eating because the nerves that report pain from our largest organ, the skin, also covers our tongues.

Feeling heat inside our mouths therefore reinforces the confusion of taste and touch, one of the four forms of “proprioception,” or the ways we become aware of physical embodiment from the sensations of heat, pain, touch, and the body’s location and movement. The contributions Julius and Ardem Patapoutian have made to the neurochemistry of heat, cold, and pressure and movement sensation would not only earn them a 2021 Nobel Prize in Medicine for work that promises new treatments of pain and hypertension, but opens a pathway to understanding the ways humans derive an enhanced awareness of physical embodiment from its pleasures (Cooney and Molteni 2022). Other researchers have found significant linkages between a subset of thrill-seeking individuals who report a strong appetite for spicy foods and a higher sensitivity to piquancy. That fraction craves capsaicin’s pain-induced endorphin spike; everyone reports enhanced flavor perception with moderate levels of spiciness, and together they suggest the complex seductions of a $1 billion hot sauce industry that features macho chile-eating contests on cable TV, not to mention the molecule’s military application against UC Davis Occupy student protestors in 2011. Add to this that chile-eaters can perceive a whole spectrum of fruit flavors, from citrusy to bitter to chocolaty, as well as the unique pungency signatures of at least seven capsaicinoid compounds. Some deliver a mellow warming sensation, while others sting with a fleeting bite in the front of the mouth; others burn at the back of and in the throat and linger much longer (Byrnes and Hayes 2013; Pringle and Quinones 2011; Bosland 1994). Professional chefs and home cooks add layers of sensory complexity by combining different kinds of chile piquancy with different ingredient flavors. The sensory variability of individual tasters further complicates the ways they experience these blends, depending on their capsaicin sensitivity or conditioning, and why the sensory perception of the chile-eating can never be entirely fixed. One would therefore expect, given the neuro-chemical instabilities between perceivers and the variabilities of the perceived, to find that different societies have different ways of interpreting and therefore enculturating their members to the chile-eating experience. Indeed, recent studies suggest that childhood socialization to spicy food remains its best predictor. Different cultures not only use different culinary practices and metaphors to transmit their respective codes of chile-eating from one generation to the next but also suggest why its consumption in the United States has continued to grow, and why gender, race, or nationality do not predict its appeal (Prescott and Swain-Campbell 2000; Ludy and Mattes 2012).

Yet we would miss a lot of the richness of the chile-eating if we only scaled its perception to an individual human body because its poetics also express specific Anthropocene ecologies. The watermelon ice I tasted on a humid August afternoon on the patio of a Santa Fe restaurant reminded me of this experience. The restaurant’s menu spoke of Española watermelons and dried Chimayó chiles, course crystals of sweet watermelon that dissolved on my tongue, spoonful after cooling spoonful, as I waited for the first hint of its piquant, orange-flavor thread. In calibrating the threshold at which piquancy becomes perceptible, the chef had created an opportunity for me to create an ambience, one bracketed by the time before piquancy and the time coming after its disappearance. In such a place, the sensations derived from a particular chile strain’s chemistry set off a kind of stopwatch, one whose durations vary from person to person, from one capsaicin compound to another, and the connotation individual tasters bring to those sensations.

For me, remembering that pleasure pulls me back to the small town of Chimayó, at the foot of Truchas Peak in the Sangre de Cristo range we had visited that day. This corner of the Española Valley, home to several locally adapted chile varieties, still retain their wilder genetic variability, as well as endemic Hispano poverty and the nation’s highest opioid overdose rates (Inez Guzman 2021). Although moralizers blamed the county’s intergenerational story of addiction on its endemic poverty, alleged isolation, and backwardness, critical witnesses say that community’s decline began with the 1846 annexation and Anglo seizures of Mexican land. The U.S. Surveyor’s Office and the Court of Private Land Claims refused to recognize hundreds of their land claims, despite treaty protections that recognized their validity. “Between 1854 and 1891,” writes Jake Kosek, “only twenty-two of the more than two hundred Hispano communal land-grant claims were verified by the court, leaving 35 million acres of New Mexico’s richest lands in legal limbo. Almost 80 percent of these remaining land-grant claims were never ratified.” Deliberate foot-dragging allowed cattle ranchers and loggers to take as much as half of Hispano holdings. The establishment of national parks continued to eat away from nuevomexicano land claims because federal policy viewed the descendants of mestizo colonists as non-indigenous “whites,” ignoring centuries of Native-Hispano intermarriage (Kosek 2006: 9), as well as the Mesoamerican seeds and technologies their ancestors carried with them along El Camino Real de Tierra Adentro, or The Royal Interior Highway, which connected Santa Fe to Mexico City. A growing tourist industry’s support for forest “preservation,” an early environmental movement’s romantic idealization of uninhabited “nature,” and Hispano collaboration in Anglo narratives that Europeanized their mestizo and Native ancestries further tilted policy against those who had ranched and logged the federal forests to make up for lost lands and jobs that never materialized.

Clearly, those north-county chile farmers who still cultivate Chimayó’s ancestral strains on small plots in the Sangre de Cristo foothills represent one thread of that colonial borderland fabric. Their locally adapted variety, what industrial horticulturalists call “landraces” despite the term’s essentializing connotations, predate the more genetically uniform cultivars now monocultured in the Southern part of the state. Their growers still curate this strain despite labeling laws the southern industrial growers lobbied for in attempts to privatize the genes and metaphors of authentic “New Mexican Chile.” That 2011 law not only prevents growers of Native chile from calling them “New Mexican Chile,” it forbids them from using any geographic references, such as Chimayó, for marketing them despite the threat of genetic swamping from the industrial cultivars (Andaluz 2016; Fowler and Mooney 1990). The 1907 to 1921 breeding experiment that produced New Mexico’s first chile cultivar, the ironically titled “Improved Native No. 9 Chile,” have since genetically erased all of the southern New Mexico’s Native strains from which it was bred. Worse, in an echo of the genocide that has decimated Native human societies since the late fifteenth century, the southern industrial cultivars now threaten the genetic integrity of northern New Mexico’s three fabled varieties, Chimayó, Cuarto Milpas, and Velarde, while at least 21 percent of the state’s other Native strains show genetic incursions from the southern industrial cultivars (Votava, Baral, and Bosland 2005) And as bad as that threat still is, native chile growers saw a bigger, more immediate threat from New Mexico State University (NMSU) genetic scientists who tried yet ultimately failed to engineer an herbicide-resistant and machine-harvested cultivar in 2018 (Ortega et al. 2018: 1–2, 17–18).

Not surprisingly Hispano, Pueblo, and Anglo growers of the native strains organized a series of actions, from a legislative and media campaign to seed saving, against the university’s efforts to develop a genetically engineered chile (Figure 5). The example of resistance that stands out for me: the 2009 song University of New Mexico folklorist Enrique Lamadrid and the late farmer-scholar Esteban Arellano composed as a trovo, or poetic form troubadours used to stage mock duels. In “El trovo del chile,” the feisty Chimayóso, a name whose alliteration suggests chismoso, or gossip, played the sassy Chimayó native pitted against the obsequious test-tube bred No. 10, successor to García’s No. 9. “With insecticidal toxins grafted into his leaves and fruit,” the poem’s prologue began, the No. 10 “is ready for mass production in fields and factories. He comes on like a rock star, but his children are sterile (vanos in Spanish), and he dispossesses the people who will mortgage their farms to pay for his seed and chemicals. In the end he doesn’t even taste good. He falls ill, panics, and tries to make friends, then is vanquished and banished for good.”

For me, the poem performed in public, on local radio, and posted on the Save New Mexico Seeds web page (www.savenmseeds.org/nm-chile-nativo) illustrates the everyday poetics of taste, place, and memory. That triad of ingredients I would discover in writing The Poetics of Fire: Indigenizing an Eco-aesthetic of Chile-eating not only suggested the feasibility of using sensory ethnography to understand my remembered experiences. It suggested a method for collating the archive of lived and written chile metaphors in that other Mexico of the borderlands, a necessary step in re-imagining what centuries of colonization has failed to silence.