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The Hot Empire of Chile
By Kent Ian Paterson
Tempe, AZ: Bilingual Press/Editorial Bilingüe, 2000
220 pp., $24.00, cloth
ISBN 0-927534-91-6
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For this Nuevo Mexicana, chile is more than the proverbial question, "red or green?"- it's a lifeway. My mother, born and raised in La Loma, a Pecos River Valley farming community, is known for her chile, or what we call at home, chile de los novios. Every year visitors come to New Mexico and indulge in the savory sights and smells this member of the pepper family evokes. Once tasted, it changes your life. The Hot Empire of Chile provides more than a few flavorful images of this billion-dollar operation, making this book an essential read. Chile's myriad names, shapes, and rated temperatures range from Sandia, poblano, yellow hots or gueritos, jalapenos, and serranos, to pequins. The author Kent Paterson, whose work appears periodically on National Public Radio, presents a broader picture that interweaves people and chile, intertwined in an industry influenced by trade agreements. Describing the cultivating, planting, harvesting, packaging, and selling of peppers from a New Mexico/Mexico standpoint (before and after free trade), this book gives the reader a sense of agriculture's inter-relationships with differing government and management systems and its affect on economies.

New Mexico chile and seeds have undergone changes, impacting the lives of people who grow, pick, and sell them. The book is divided into chapters that include: "The Blossoming of the Chile Culture"; "Saint Chile"; "The Hatch Valley: Pickin'the Red and the Green"; "Huelga"; and "Peppery Paradoxes" to name a few. Paterson uses a straightforward account of an entire industry, revealing: "At one point, more New Mexicans depended on chile for their paychecks than on the California electronics plants relocating to the Albuquerque area."

Did you ever wonder how the Anaheim, Garcia's # 9 and Big Jim seeds came about? Chile cultivators and their contributions made throughout the Southwest are noted. Paterson explores the states most valued resources from the benchmark of Fabian Garcia at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces, to the demands of various restaurant customers who request blue corn green chile chicken enchilada plates. It is an increasingly popular cuisine beyond the land of ristra-decked adobe walls. Fall is marked by smells of roasting chiles in backyards, street corners of local growers markets, and grocery stores that sell and prepare fresh green chile.

Numerous interviews and fact-filled writing includes historical accounts. Among my favorites are the propane-fired metal roasters that garnish roadsides during the season. In the early 1980s, the Sanchez brothers built roasters and found markets for these machines suited for those who want to save time, energy, and threats of teary eyes and burning finger tips.

One of the pieces that best draws the connections between family, economics, and governmental systems is found in "Dona Lincha's World: The Life of the Woman Farmworker." In this story of survival, Lorenza Primero is a campesina who shares her love and pride as a Chile and onion picker. While work conditions and low pay are continuous battles, Lorenza endures other types of obstacles ...struggles to reach job sites. Many workers with or without papers play critical roles in the agricultural industry of this country. However, they are voiceless in their experiences of injustice regarding housing, health care, and educational systems. Primero is one of many women who make the journey from Juarez to Hatch without protection from hazards of wildcats and bureaucratic fat cats that order the deportation of "illegals:" She explains, "You know there's a lot of competition from the poor people in Juarez. As a mother of 10, I had to find work ....all of us who crossed had the goal of improving our lives."

The North American Free Trade Agreement has impacted the Chile industry in the sense that a farmer must take on all responsibilities and assigned duties - from seed to can - in order to survive. Complexity of the trade is hard to unravel and creates many questions. Some U.S. growers believed they would be competing with the Mexicans, who since the early 1990s have been producing fresh Chile for the U.S. market. Infections and insects created crop losses and increased the use of chemicals by Mexico growers. Pesticide residue problems are known by the U.S. government's FDA. Paterson writes, "In essence, however, what the U.S. growers were really faced with was not the prospect of competing with the Mexicans per se, many of whom ran small farms that paled in technological comparison, but with U.S.based corporations and farmers who were gradually assuming increased control over Mexican agricultural production:"

Hot Empire provides an overview of complicated trade between the U.S. and Mexico. Advanced technologies in the U.S. creates a rush for Mexico to catch up. Free trade translates to a greater awareness of a local economy's vulnerability to globalization and corporate control of the agricultural industry, and more specifically Chile.

Countless interviews with hard working individuals adds to the richness of this book and plurality of voice. Kent Paterson does an excellent job describing in depth the many facets and people involved in bringing Chile from the fields, to the chalora of my Mom's Chile Colorado. Quemoso!

- Frances Ortega

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