When you talk to Victor Valle, you can immediately tell he is passionate about two things: his Mexican heritage and the food that comes with it.
In 1984, Valle — now a professor emeritus in the Ethnic Studies Department at California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo — won the Pulitzer Prize with other Chicano journalists at the Los Angeles Times for a groundbreaking series on Latinos in Southern California. Soon after, he decided to change his career path to look deeper into the history, politics and presence of the Latino community in the United States.
As with many others of Mexican descent, Valle’s heart and brains are deeply connected to his palate. His 1995 book Recipe of Memory: Five Generations of Mexican Cuisine, is a reflection on the guisados (stews) that passed from generation to generation in his family.
Valle returned with The Poetics of Fire: Metaphors of Chile Eating in the Borderlands (University of New Mexico Press), published in November. In the book he returns to his passion for his culture and gastronomy, but this time putting in the center of his political and historical reflections a quintessential element of Mexican traditional cuisine: the local varieties of capsicum fruits — also known as peppers or, in plain Mexican Spanish/Náhuatl, chiles.
In an interview with Capital & Main, Valle discussed his book, exploring our appetite for food and for equality.
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Capital & Main: An important part of your research focuses on the concept of unequal knowledge, or epistemic inequality, as you call it. What is it, and how does it link to colonialism and capitalism?
Victor Valle: This book deals with epistemic inequality, or the power to create and control knowledge. You’re dealing with inequality, as in, who’s knowledge is in fact recognized as knowledge? And this is also economically related. The way it’s represented is about how we build commodities, but a step before the marketplace. It’s the inequality of knowledge production.
Immigrant knowledge is invalidated. Part of the whole thing is immigrant workers are paid less and, along with their immigration status, they will not be seen as knowledgeable workers.
But we also have to talk about colonialism and its lasting effects on our community. The knowledge of Native populations on land is very different to capitalism. There is no concept of nation for those populations, for example. The Native idea of land is at fundamental odds with capitalism. It’s about the place and the relationship and adaptation with the place, not about owning property. It’s communal implicitly, while in capitalism property is key.
Why did you choose to address the historic inequality affecting Latinos, particularly Mexicans and Americans of Mexican descent, through chiles?
This hybrid cuisine that we call Mexican wasn’t made in an instant, it was a whole process. And a lot of that process happened in the provincias, not in the big cities.
The Spanish did not begin to eat chile until way after their arrival [to the Americas]. It was mercantilist capitalism that created an economy in the Americas to sustain activities, like growing chiles. But, for instance, the Spanish would not allow New Spain [now mostly Mexico] to grow olives, because at some point it would compete with their own.
So you begin to see it wasn’t a simplistic process but an early capitalist economy.
Capitalism creates new kinds of enclosures to create new property, whether it is genomic, copyright law or concepts that are founded in colonialism. Making people into property, for example — as in slavery — or making them expendable — none of that would be possible without colonialism. In fact, capitalism doesn’t become a world system until it conquers the Americas.
Spaniards distinguished “comida de indios” or “food of the indigenous” from “comida de cristianos” or “food for Christians.” Your book suggests that divide still survives in a way in the U.S. However, chiles and other indigenous-based ingredients have made their way to American tables. Is our society becoming more tolerant or is it just a fashion in which we are romanticizing the past?
I think all of them. Look at the food shows now, and look at the evolution of food shows from the 1960s until now. And one of the things you are going to see is that you can’t have a food show without Latin American food, but especially Mexican food.
Chiles are just one aspect of it. So part of it has to do with travel, and people are eating really, really good food. It is like learning a language. But then you also have the thrill seekers, shows on cable with people just eating really, really hot food.
Chiles have been domesticated throughout time, like many other crops, including corn (or maíz). How is industrialization clashing with traditional methods?
Ancient societies were very sophisticated and had different purposes for their crops, like creating different strains of maíz because every place requires different genetic characteristics to grow effectively. So they were always thinking ecologically. Industrial agriculture is not; it’s monoculture. Industrial cropping wants to create a commodity for mass consumption.
But now, with sustainable agriculture, the ancient milpa technology is being seen as a way of growing high quality food with very little land, especially if you don’t have animal help or tractors. And it is so effective that the milpa technique is being exported to other parts of the world, now called intercropping. And it’s also very effective for dealing with climate change and carbon capture.
New Mexico, for instance, doesn’t grow all the chiles in the world, but it was an attempt to industrialize chile production, which succeeded to a degree, but not to the degree that farmers wanted. And now that production is declining because it’s not sustainable in an era of climate change.
There’s no way to leave Mesoamerica out of the New Mexico chile story. And yet, when you are retelling the story, many people erase the Mesoamericans, whether it’s the 7,000 years history of developing the strains or the Tlaxcalans who came to New Mexico with the conquistadores to grow them — you can not exclude this from the story.
Latinos can’t be heard in the U.S. until we address this epistemic inequality.
Your analysis in your book on the New Mexico chile crop history illustrates how, on one hand, we face a more globalized world with free trade, while there is also another perspective focusing on the rebirth of ancient techniques and social responsibility. Can we reconcile those two visions?
Absolutely. This is what I call to be indigenized. To survive where you live.
It means to understand what it takes to survive, either in the desert or in the mountains of California, for example. But that’s an open ended process. We are just starting that process, but the reality of surviving from climate change is making it urgent.
This is a very exciting moment, like an opening act where we as Latinos can tell our stories and be the meters in the dialogues and not only the witnesses and the bystanders.
We are starting this change too late, and we will face very horrific periods; even so we have to prepare ourselves to be actors in our worlds. But now the scientific communities are listening. They are becoming aware of how the Western view has closed down other visions that are very important.
As you explore how chiles and Mexican gastronomy evolve, you also tackle how Latinos, particularly Mexicans and Mexican-Americans, deal with their identity. How is Latino identity and representation currently affected by capitalism and colonialism?
You can´t talk about our communities without talking about transnationality. So the first thing is, how do we explain the border between the United States and Mexico as an artifact of colonialism that we continue to live through every day?
The border is a technology of the state that is used to create different kinds of categories of price labor. And it’s a constant process by the way we change immigration rules and laws, going back to the Bracero program [of the 1940s] to the DACA students now. And not just national borders, but to impose those borders into the population. This is a constant process in which our coloniality is reinscribed and changed and modified to the detriment of our community. You are either recognized as fully human or marginalized.
The problem that we have as Latinos, as colonized people, our relationship to the pre-Christian past, which is very complicated. And some of us have it very close, and some of us don’t.
So one of the problems Chicanos have is to tend to idealize that pre-Christian, Mesoamerican past. Not really understanding the story very well by not reading the original sources is part of the problem.
We’re just beginning to really understand pre-Christian cosmology. The Spaniards did all they could to silence it and disqualify it, and the U.S. Anglos continued it. But instead of trying to go back to that original place and put some feathers in my hair — we know that’s not going to work — why don’t we move forward and think on how we can participate?
We have great opportunities nowadays, particularly in California and the Western states, where environmental policies are becoming more and more important, for instance. More resources are being dedicated to that, but we need our own story to participate in the science and in the policy. And I don’t see any Latino environmentalists with their own voices. We are just very supportive.
