The Spice of Life

Fall in New Mexico means chile roasting. The smoky, sweet, and pungent aroma is not just the smell of chiles tumbling in a wire basket over an open flame, it is the essence of New Mexican heritage. It was in New Mexico that I first became acquainted with the chile and over the years experience has taught me never to be surprised when I encounter this spicy pepper in new and unexpected places. Chiles have played a central role in developing the cultural and culinary identities of populations around the world. Their bold color and taste has imbued them with an equally bold personality. The chile pepper is powerful, sexy, and adaptable, flavoring each society that adopts it. However, as cultural appropriation shapes the chile in return, it loses the very kick that made it irresistible.

My chile journey started thousands of years after its own began, and we did not get off to a good start. On the way back to Colorado from my family’s annual fall trip to New Mexico, we parked by a roadside stand to buy chile ristras, long strings of dried chiles hung both for decorative purposes and to provide spice throughout the winter. Mesmerized by their intense red color and unusual shape, I could not resist the urge to reach out and touch one. As I looked over bushel baskets heaped with produce, I casually wiped some dirt from my eye. Immediately I felt a fierce pain. An important lesson: chiles must be respected, or as the Greek origin of their name indicates, they will bite back. Despite being attacked on our first meeting, the chile and I have reconciled as I discovered my love for green chile stew, chiles rellenos, and spicy red chile enchiladas. However, I was far from the first to fall under the spell of the chile’s unpredictable personality; this dates back to 7000 BCE with the Mesoamericans.

For the Mesoamericans, chiles were a mystical foodstuff that inspired legends explaining the sun, the moon, and the very existence of mankind. In the Maya creation myth, the sun fell in love with an Earth girl and kidnapped her. The girl’s father became furious and fired his blowgun at the sun in retaliation. But the sun had tricked the father, replacing his projectile with chile dust. Still, the dust hit the sun causing it to drop the earth girl, who shattered into tiny pieces when she struck the ocean below. The fish of the ocean assembled a net to bring the girl back to the sun, but the sun had become too hot, so she could not be returned. Instead, they released the girl to become the moon and the sparkling fish in the net became the stars. In an Inca creation myth, the chile deity Ayar Uchu is the ancestor of all mankind. 

The details of these ancient creation myths construct the chile as a powerful entity, responsible for changing the world around it. The chile captivated Mesoamericans with its heat, a heat that the Maya compared (and not unjustly for some types) to the heat of the sun. Although potatoes and tomatoes provided sustenance, the chile’s fieriness was unique. Its burn was an inexplicable power that these civilizations viewed as a fundamental force, one capable of shaping the very universe. What’s more, the Inca believed in an intimate relationship between peppers and people. Chile peppers have, as people do, a personality. They embody two basic human characteristics: sometimes they are spicy and sometimes they are sweet. Perhaps this is something the chile passed down through its lineage, leaving its permanent mark on humankind. Chiles had a devoted following in Mesoamerica, but they still had the rest of the world to conquer. 

The chile had been established in Mesoamerica for thousands of years before it leapt to global prominence in fewer than fifty. Although the Europeans showed little interest in this spice after Columbus “discovered” it during his journey of 1492, the chile temporarily made its home on Portuguese ships, spreading its seed along the routes of the slave trade. The key to the chile pepper’s international success was that it adapted easily to a variety of climates, making it feasible to grow in home gardens. In a time when black pepper was used as a currency to pay rent and taxes, the chile came to occupy its own niche as a spice for the poor. As the chile pepper became widely available, it quickly took the place of black pepper, transforming world cuisine as it took root in cultures around the globe. 

This food became so integral to some international cuisines that many cultures consider the chile pepper to be native. This past summer, I sat down to my first Indian meal, breakfast with my host family in Bangalore. Now I knew that Indian food was famous for its spices, but were those green chiles? No, I thought, green chiles were New Mexican. The previous summer I had discovered that even in Peru, so close to the birthplace of the pepper, they ate ají, a very different chile from the green chile I knew. My host family laughed at my astonishment, insisting green chiles were purely Indian. I was perplexed, but pleasantly surprised that I had chosen to work in a place where I would be eating green chile for breakfast, a welcome reminder of home.

Although I have encountered the chile in its birthplace and on the opposite side of the globe, to me they will always be symbolic of New Mexican culture. I asked Sam Quintana, a close family friend whose New Mexican heritage can be traced back to the 1600s, to relay his own experience with the chile. His memories were all very sensory: the smell of chiles roasting on the cast-iron stove, the smooth texture of the fresh chiles he strung on ristras, the striking red color of the powdered chile he mixed in with mashed potatoes on Thanksgiving. A meal was simply not complete without it. Even for snacks, Sam recalled eating a roasted chile rolled up in a warm, homemade tortilla. For generations, chiles lived in the personal gardens of each home, a crucial member of every New Mexican family.

However, tourism has recently uprooted the chile, as cultural appropriation transformed it into a commoditized attraction and cash crop. New Mexico is a hotspot for cultural tourism; visitors come looking for an exotic experience, and the chile satisfies their craving for spice. Yet, most tourists can’t handle the chile in its full force, so it is diluted and slowly changed to satisfy their tastes. This is perhaps most evident in the Hatch green chile created by horticulturist Fabian Garcia. Garcia bred this famous chile by selecting for traits that allowed it to be mass-produced and visually appealing in stores. Sam cringes when the Hatch green chile is brought up, offended by its utter lack of taste. The chile is in the midst of a disquieting transformation; something that is integral to New Mexican culture, sown more than four hundred years ago, is being homogenized and commoditized. Sadly, the commoditization has taken the snap out of the crop whose very name means to bite back.

The attempted conquest of the chile is further exemplified in the complex sexual representation of the chile and its gendered role in today’s society. In the United States, the spicy and exotic chile became strongly associated with Latina women, representing temptation but also risk. This was perfectly embodied by the Chili Queens of San Antonio, Latina women who popularized chili (the kind that comes in a bowl) by selling it on the streets, thus leading to its cultural appropriation. Eating chili soon became an act of bravado for white American men, allowing them to give into the temptation while controlling the risk. Soon, chili-eating competitions began popping up where men competed to assert their dominance over the chile. Despite the machismo associated with consuming chiles, the chile itself is associated with the sex appeal of women, and the sex act itself. For centuries, the chile was considered to be an aphrodisiac. The Inca, for example, related the heat of a chile to the burn of sexual desire. Throughout history, women have been cast as tempters and seducers of men, and now Americans were being similarly seduced by the chile. In return, society has been inclined to subdue the fieriness of both. 

The Inca and Maya understood the chile’s power through the myths and legends that personified it. However, as modern society attempts to understand nature purely through science, the mystifying power of the chile is degraded to the chemical makeup of capsaicin, the compound that gives chiles their heat. Chiles have become watercolor copies of the original; they may have the same outward appearance, but some have lost the wildness within. Instead of conquering the chile, we would do better to learn to respect it. I still cannot resist the temptation to touch the chiles; I love to run my hand along the rows of hundreds of ristras hung to dry in the New Mexico sun. As they deepen from the bright red of the fresh chiles to the blood red of the dried chiles, so their flavor deepens as well. But now I know better than to touch my eyes and I cannot help hoping that they never become too tame, too overbred to bite back.