This post is part of Carmen Ortega’s 2022 Yale Farm Summer Internship Independent Project.
This summer, I’ve thought a lot about the concept of place, which “encompasses not only a specific location and the physical world, but also the human relationships and meanings that unfold there” (Schnell 624). Physical space becomes place when we “get to know it better and endow it with value,” and “there is no place without self and no self without place.” (Casey 684, Tuan 6).
My independent project began with a question about place: how have Indigenous and Mestizo food and agricultural traditions in New Mexico contributed to the state’s unique sense of place, particularly as catalysts for spirituality, healing, and community? I came to this question after reflecting on why I was drawn to the Yale Farm internship in the first place: my raíces (roots). I am a proud Nuevo Mexicana, raised in Albuquerque and part of the Ortega, Maes, Chavez, and Padilla families from central and northern New Mexico. I identify as Mestiza; on both sides, my family can trace our ancestry back to the sixteenth-century Spanish colonists of the region, and, like most Hispanic New Mexicans, we also have Indigenous ancestry.
In preparation for a recent discussion, the farm interns read a piece about decolonization in settler colonial states. One sentence, about the way Native Americans have been racialized in the United States, stood out to me: "Native Americanness is subtractive: Native Americans are constructed to become fewer in number and less Native, but never exactly white, over time" (Tuck & Yang). First, I want to acknowledge that my racial identity of "Mestiza," of mixed Indigenous and European ancestry, gives me a certain degree of privilege. But this sentence also made me ponder how Mestizos in New Mexico were forcibly stripped of their "Native Americanness"-- my family speaks Spanish, and we were able to learn the names of our European ancestors through Catholic church records, yet we know extraordinarily little about our Indigenous ones. As a result, I have also been racialized by this country as less native, but never exactly white. This realm of precarity and uncertainty about my Indigeneity has always left me searching for my raíces that were lost to settler colonialism.
The path that I’ve chosen toward reclaiming these raíces and understanding “place” in New Mexico is through plants and food. In her article “Decolonize your Diet,” Catrióna Rueda Esquibel explains that growing and eating heritage food is a form of cultural and physical survival. When I think about both of my grandmothers and their commitment to nourishing their families with the recipes they learned from their mothers, grandmothers, and from preceding generations, I see this cultural survival at play. This project represents my love and admiration of food and plants as family, medicine, community, and place in “la tierra del encanto” (the land of enchantment).