Farming across Borders uses agricultural history to connect the regional experiences of the American West, northern Mexico, western Canada, and the North American side of the Pacific Rim, now writ large into a broad history of the North American West. Case studies of commodity production and distribution, trans-border agricultural labor, and environmental change unite to reveal new perspectives on a historiography traditionally limited to a regional approach. Sterling Evans has curated nineteen essays to explore the contours of “big” agricultural history. Crops and commodities discussed include wheat, cattle, citrus, pecans, chiles, tomatoes, sugar beets, hops, henequen, and more. Toiling over such crops, of course, were the people of the North American West, and as such, the contributing authors investigate the role of agricultural labor, from braceros and Hutterites to women working in the sorghum fields and countless other groups in between. As Evans concludes, “society as a whole (no matter in what country) often ignores the role of agriculture in the past and the present.” Farming across Borders takes an important step toward cultivating awareness and understanding of the agricultural, economic, and environmental connections that loom over the North American West regardless of lines on a map. In the words of one essay, “we are tied together . . . in a hundred different ways.”

For much of the twentieth century, modernization did not simply radiate from cities into the hinterlands; rather, the broad project of modernity, and resistance to it, has often originated in farm fields, at agricultural festivals, and in agrarian stories. In New Mexico no crops have defined the people and their landscape in the industrial era more than apples, cotton, and chiles. In Fruit, Fiber, and Fire William R. Carleton explores the industrialization of apples, cotton, and chiles to show how agriculture has affected the culture of twentieth-century New Mexico. 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. Through the local stories that represent lives filled with meaningful struggles, lessons, and successes, along with the systems of knowledge in our recent agricultural past, Carleton provides a history of the broader culture of farmers and farmworkers. In the process, seemingly mere marginalia—a farmworker’s meal, a small orchard’s advertisement campaign, or a long-gone chile seed—add up to an agricultural past with diverse cultural influences, many possible futures, and competing visions of how to feed and clothe ourselves that remain relevant as we continue to reimagine the crops of our future.

In The Poetics of Fire, Pulitzer prize-winning journalist and Chicano author Victor M. Valle posits the chile as a metaphor for understanding the shared cultural histories of ChicanX and LatinX peoples from preconquest Mesoamerica to twentieth-century New Mexico. Valle uses the chile as a decolonizing lens through which to analyze preconquest Mesoamerican cosmology, early European exploration, and the forced conversion of Native peoples to Catholicism as well as European and Mesoamerican perspectives on food and place. Assembling a rich collection of source material, Valle highlights the fiery fruit's overarching importance as evidenced by the ubiquity of references to the plant over several centuries in literature, art, official documents, and more to offer a new eco-aesthetic reading--a reframing of culinary history from a pluralistic, non-Western perspective.

Providing food for the brain as well as the body, this wonderful collection of essays explores the boundaries between Mexican and Mexican-American foods, promotes philosophical understandings of Mexican-American cuisine, and shares recipes from both past and present. Defining Mexican-American food is difficult due to its incredibly diverse roots and traditions. This unique style of cuisine varies significantly from Mexican and Latin American cuisines, fusing Native American and Hispanic influences stemming from three centuries of first Spanish and later Mexican rule. In Mexican-American Cuisine, renowned authority in Latino culture Ilan Stavans and 10 other experts in southwestern cuisine explore the food itself and associated traditions. The book presents nine scholarly essays that examine philosophical understandings of Mexican-American cuisine. Covering both platillos principales (main dishes) and postres (desserts), the authors serve up a sideboard of anthropological, ethnographic, sociological, and culinary observations. Essay topics include the boundaries between Mexican and Mexican-American food, the history and uses of the chile, and the derivations of Mexican cuisine. Readers are also treated to recipes and recommendations by 19th-century California chef Encarnación Pinedo who explores "The Art of Cooking."

No detailed description available for "Food Across Borders".

This book gives you a passport to some of the world's most flavorful and piquant cuisines (without having to go through Customs!). There are recipes to excite the fussiest of taste buds and also a wealth of information on the cultures in which each recipe is traditionally enjoyed. If you're always on the lookout for that next hot thing, then this book is where your quest ends.

As a site of scientific activity, the Southwest may be best known for atomic research at Los Alamos and astronomical observations at Kitt Peak. But as George Webb shows, these twentieth-century endeavors follow a complex history of discovery that dates back to Spanish colonial times, and they point toward an exciting future. Ranging broadly over the natural and human sciences, Webb shows that the Southwest—specifically Arizona, New Mexico, and west Texas—began as a natural laboratory that attracted explorers interested in its flora, fauna, and mineral wealth. Benjamin Silliman's mining research in the nineteenth century, for example, marked the development of the region as a colonial outpost of American commerce, and A. E. Douglass's studies of climatic cycles through tree rings attest to the rise of institutional research. World War II and the years that followed brought more scientists to the region, seeking secluded outposts for atomic research and clear skies for astronomical observations. What began as a colony of the eastern scientific establishment soon became a self-sustaining scientific community. Webb shows that the rise of major institutions—state universities, observatories, government labs—proved essential to the growth of Southwest science, and that government support was an important factor not only in promoting scientific research at Los Alamos but also in establishing agricultural and forestry experiment stations. And in what had always been a land of opportunity, women scientists found they had greater opportunity in the Southwest than they would have had back east. All of these factors converged at the end of the last century, with the Southwest playing a major role in NASA's interplanetary probes. While regionalism is most often used in studying culture, Webb shows it to be equally applicable to understanding the development of science. The individuals and institutions that he discusses show how science was established and grew in the region and reflect the wide variety of research conducted. By joining Southwest history with the history of science in ways that illumine both fields, Webb shows that the understanding of regional science is essential to a complete understanding of the Southwest.

In this powerful cultural critique, Ariel Dorfman explores the political and social implications of the smiling faces that inhabit familiar books, comics, and magazines. He reveals the ideological messages conveyed in works of popular culture such as the Donald Duck comics, the Babar children’s books, and Reader’s Digest magazine. The Empire’s Old Clothes was widely praised when it was first published in 1983. This edition, including a new preface by the author, makes a contemporary classic newly available.

Provides instructions for seven hundred and fifty recipes that utilize vegetables, including tabbouleh with red and hot peppers, chard gratin, creamy carrot soup, and morels with rhubarb and asparagus.

In this innovative volume, leading historians of the early modern Americas examine the subjects of early modern, continuing colonization, and the relations between established colonies and frontiers of settlement. Their original essays about centers and peripheries in Spanish, Portuguese, French, Dutch, and British America invite comparison.