THE LINE OF FIRE
William Carleton

NARROW ROADS WOUND through and above canyons that cut deep into green mountains. Clouds passed. Storms built and poured rain and moved on. The sun beat down. Helicopters swirled. Dust clouds trailed the Border Patrol, the drug runners, the deer hunters, and now me, the chile hunter.

I was perched beneath a mesquite tree in the soft October sun in southern Arizona. I had found what I was looking for. The sweet juice of the wild chiltepin chile made my eyes sweat.

I drove here from Albuquerque to find these little things.  It wasn’t easy. I am not sure what I was expecting to feel when I found the peppers. I spent the year growing and selling vegetables for Albuquerque restaurants and growers’ markets, and I wanted to get away from domesticated crops to experience a more wild bounty before winter set in. I was hoping to recapture some of the mountain summer I had missed by spending so much of my time farming in the valley.

I also sought the thrill of finding a relic of a more ancient vanishing past. I hoped to witness something wild before it succumbed to overgrazing, over harvesting, or GMO pollution. What I witnessed, however, was something more defiant. I found little shrubby bushes with hot red berries on an arid, scrabbly mountainside, watching the war along the border unfold around them.

These little peppers were unlike ones in New Mexico. My thoughts couldn’t help but wander eastward two hundred miles along the borderline to New Mexico’s “chile capital of the world.” The contrasts between this chiltepin pepper and a standard industrial chile, such as the “6-4,” are staggering. The chiltepin, a tiny, fiery, seedy, pea-shaped pellet, hits your tongue like a snake bite.  Its intensity is immediate but soon dissipates. A faint after-fire of smoky sweetness lingers. Your chest lightens as it pumps the heat throughout your body. The 6-4, on the other hand, is long, meaty, watery, and mild.

As I sat beneath a mesquite tree staring at distant Mexican peaks, I thought about how these two very different peppers share more than common ancestry. Clearly the U.S.-Mexico border runs through them both, but how exactly and why that matters remained unclear. My questions, born from three days of hunting these chiles, grew into weeks of research on the history of the two peppers. The shape of the chile, it turns out, reflects the shape of the border.          

THE FIRST PLACE I LOOKED for the wild chile, three days earlier, was a canyon just northwest of Nogales. A former park ranger recommended this canyon because of its perennial water and reputation as a home to rare plants not usually found this side of the border.

As I followed the winding canyon and the rock walls grew steeper, I examined each shrub and plant for red berries. There were all sorts of plants I had never seen before. The trail was littered with the familiar trash of a migrant trail—Gatorade bottles, abandoned backpacks, and wrappers.

After two hours of fruitlessly hiking south, I decided to change my strategy and look along the slopes above the stream. It seemed counterintuitive to move away from water, but I decided it couldn’t hurt. I took what I believed was a random route up out of the canyon. Halfway up, I suddenly stopped. I had nearly stepped on a large black tarp with several lumps underneath. I took a deep breath and turned around. I had just found a load of drugs.

I descended back into the canyon, a bit shaken but nonetheless eager to continue. I came to a narrow section with deep water. I would either have to swim or attempt a risky maneuver to climb around it. For several minutes I wandered off-trail, scouting another possible route. I came across a cave. Hoping to salvage a caving experience out of an otherwise unsuccessful chile hunt, I approached the cave. Once again, I stopped in my tracks.

Was that a face peering back at me from inside the cave? I couldn’t be sure. I shifted direction abruptly and headed northward towards my truck. The hunt for the wild chile, finished for the day, had suddenly become more complicated.

IN ALBUQUERQUE, weeks later, I began to put together a history of the chile industry and the U.S.-Mexico border. The history I uncovered has taken place in and around Las Cruces, New Mexico, where over the past century researchers have bred many chile varieties catered to industrial needs. One such need was to make the chile milder and thus more appealing to a wider, non-Hispanic market. Another was to breed a chile that could be easily grown, harvested, and processed mechanically. In both cases, the borderline shifted. In the first case, the border expanded to bring chile to parts of the U.S. where chile had previously been nearly nonexistent. In the second case, researchers aimed to breed labor out of the chile, thus de-emphasizing the wage differences and labor gaps that have plagued producers on the north side for decades. In this light, I began to view the most recent change in the chile—the genetically engineered (GE) chile with Roundup Ready genes—as the latest in a longstanding effort to redraw the borderline with capital-intensive technology and genetic improvements.

The story begins roughly a century ago, when Chihuahuan-born New Mexico State University (NMSU) researcher and so-called “Father of the Chile” Fabian Garcia developed the No. 9 chile. At the time, local growers preferred several types of native chiles, including the pasilla (dark brown), colorado (red), and negro (black). Garcia chose to develop the red variety, explaining that the new variety was “larger, smoother, fleshier, more tapering and included a shoulder-less pod for canning purposes.”  Perhaps most importantly, this chile contained less heat than local chiles, a characteristic Garcia believed would help increase its popularity among the Anglo population. Yet because the No. 9 was not consistent enough, many farmers continued to grow several different varieties throughout the 1940s.

That began to change in 1950, when NMSU breeder Roy Harper developed the New Mexico No. 6. This pepper, derived from a local landrace variety, was milder, higher yielding, shorter, and more uniform in color.  It matured more quickly and concurrently than the No. 9 and was thus more labor-efficient to mass harvest and process. The No. 6 was tweaked into the No. 6-4 in 1957 and has remained an industry staple variety ever since. The magic chile that required no unskilled labor remained elusive, and all the while, workers came from the south to pick.

The development of the mild 6-4 industrial chile coincided with the Bracero Program, which brought in nearly 5 million Mexican-born guest farm workers from 1942 to 1964. After the Bracero Program ended abruptly in 1964, many producers continued to grow by hiring illegal workers. The link between the Bracero Program’s end and the beginning of heavy illegal migration is clear. In 1963, the Border Patrol apprehended 41,600 Mexicans illegally in the United States. By 1970, apprehensions increased to 348,200 annually and, by 1986, 1.7 million annually.

All the while, chile pickers endured the notoriously harsh working conditions shared by farm workers across the country that Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers brought to the world’s attention. Their wages were low (the going hourly rate for a chile picker in 1974 was between $1 and $1.25 compared to the $2.00/hour minimum wage at the time), their housing was often packed and substandard, and their benefits nonexistent.  A 1974 article from the Las Cruces Sun-News derisively described the area’s migrant population as hardworking and obliging while at the same time prone to prostitution, STDs, shoplifting, and stressing local medical care. Despite decades of efforts by workers and activists (and even a few strikes), the conditions of farm workers in New Mexico saw few improvements.

It was thus on the back of cheap and available Mexican labor, and with the aid of the mild 6-4 chile that appealed to growing U.S. tastes for Mexican food, that the New Mexican chile industry boomed from the mid-1970s through the early 1990s. Acres devoted to chile increased, and the future for New Mexican producers seemed bright. All that would change in December of 1993, however, with the signing of NAFTA and the reshaping of the border that followed.

AFTER MY UNSUCCESSFUL HUNT the day before, I decided to go the easy route and head for the Wild Chile Botanical Area. I had read that the 2500-acre preserve in Arizona’s Tumacacori Mountains had one of the largest stands of chiltepin this side of the border. I imagined I would get out of my truck and find wild chiles growing next to the parking area. For that matter, I imagined there would be a parking area.

Although the directions to the preserve seemed basic enough—take the only road west from the Tumacacori exit off I-19—I decided to play it safe and stop in at the Santa Cruz Chile & Spice Company for some directions and advice.

“Pack heat,” the woman told me after a theatrically long pause when I mentioned my plan. She seemed confused that someone would ever venture into those mountains. “I haven’t seen peppers out there in years.” The woman summoned an older lady, who appeared to be the boss, and asked her if she thought the chiltepines would be there.

The older lady shrugged.  Her eyes grew distant. She said she used to take her donkey up there with her father in the 1930s. Then, in the forties, someone cut nearly all the peppers down. “There used to be a lot,” she said with a those-were-the-days smile. She knew of the preserve but hadn’t heard of anyone finding any peppers in recent years. My heart sank as she spoke.

Then, perhaps intending to completely  crush my now flagging spirit, the younger woman stepped in to update me on how many bodies had been found in the Tumacacori Mountains in the past month. She went on to explain what to do if I see a black tarp (apparently my immediate U-turn the previous day was appropriate) or a cell phone (“Don’t pick it up, they’re starting to detonate bombs with them”). After this barrage of terrifying information, she offered her most useful advice of the day: “When the road splits, head left.”

TUMACACORI, ROUGHLY TRANSLATED from an ancient Tohono O’odom dialect, means “place where the wild chiles grow.” Tohono O’odom people have known about and harvested wild peppers for a long time and even made pilgrimages into present-day Mexico to gather them.  This fact comforted me when I considered how many miles I had come for the chiles.

Today chiltepin are most heavily harvested in Sonora, where there is a substantial market for the foraged crop. Lately, traditional chiltepineros have complained of slipping yields. They blame outsiders who come and chop down entire stands of chiltepin for a quick, lucrative, and highly destructive harvest. The chiltepin can sell for $20 a pound in Mexico and often much more in the U.S.

The monetary value of the chiltepin, however, pales compared to its genetic value. The chiltepin is the closest extant relative to the progenitor of nearly all domesticated peppers, capsicum annum. It has seen and adapted to more climatic changes than any other pepper and therefore carries more potential genetic resistance to diseases or weather changes we might face in years ahead.

NAFTA SHOOK UP the structure of the border and sent the chile industry reeling and the workers scrambling. U.S. producers could not compete with Mexico, where laborers made roughly five times less. Mexican imports surged. The producers increased their pressure on researchers to develop technological solutions and effectively offset the Mexican labor advantage with the New Mexican advantages of technology and capital. Within a decade, this effort bore some fruit. Industry leaders unveiled new thinning technologies in 2003 and de-stemmers in 2008. Within the last five years, mechanization across the state has soared. Yet mechanization has had an extreme effect on workers (fewer jobs and slashed wages) without stopping the industry downturn. The industry still seeks a Holy Grail technological fix, but producers and processors have been simultaneously pursuing other solutions. One such solution is to work with, not against, Mexico.

Within the first four years of NAFTA, as the vast majority of New Mexican green jalapeño and red cayenne production went south, processors began to contract with Mexican farms. Small New Mexican chile producers without a Mexican link struggled. It appeared, as one reporter put it, that the developing trend was “likely to thin the ranks of chile farmers, leaving a few with one foot in New Mexico, the other in Old Mexico.”

More recently, threats of Mexican competition have been further muted by the larger threat of other foreign producers, mainly China. By 2005, an agricultural engineer at NMSU could claim that it’s not “us against Mexico,” but rather, “the big worry is China and Africa.” Even by 1998, the majority of global chile production took place in Asia and under ten percent in North America. 

In light of this larger global competition, the New Mexican chile industry has merged to some degree with Chihuahuan producers. A recent study involving ten chile producers in Chihuahua observed that each Chihuahuan chile farmer spoke English, maintained a U.S. mailing address and a checking account in U.S. banks, deposited checks written by U.S. processors denominated in dollars into their U.S. bank accounts, purchased U.S. inputs with U.S. funds, and quoted prices in dollars per U.S. unit for virtually all purchased inputs including machinery, fertilizer, chemicals and seed. In addition, most Chihuahuan producers carry cell phones with U.S. telephone numbers.

THUS, NAFTA SPURRED a reshaped border that compelled producers and processors on both sides to straddle the line, closing the distance between the two countries by allowing product to move more cheaply. Yet the opening of this border has in part resulted from a closing on another front—labor. New Mexican producers routinely complain that the tightening of border security has hurt their workforce. NAFTA transformed a border that had been porous for workers, but not chiles, into the exact opposite.

Just as this element of the border proves malleable, so does the attitude of the New Mexican chile industry toward their Chihuahuan counterparts. A recent salmonella outbreak, for example, had Mexican officials crying foul against the U.S. for trying to scare U.S. consumers into avoiding Mexican chile. Furthermore, a campaign has emerged in New Mexico to buy only “New Mexico Grown.” This marketing strategy, born partly from the growing local food movement, is a direct reaction to the more immediate threat of  genetically engineered (GE) chile.

The GE chile represents a third solution for the New Mexico chile industry. Where mechanization and partnerships with Mexico have not saved the industry from free fall, the industry hopes that biotechnology might. By offering a competitive advantage to farmers who can afford the expensive seed and pesticide, the industry hopes to shift power away from areas like Mexico, whose main advantage is cheap, low-tech labor.

Various groups have emerged to fight the GE chile. Opponents declared it would perpetuate the harmful, unsustainable farming practices that were in part responsible for the low yields plaguing New Mexico producers and threaten farmers’ livelihoods through loss of seed and potential lawsuits. In 2006, a group led by traditional native and Hispanic farmers issued a seed sovereignty proclamation that described “genetic modification and the potential contamination of our landraces by GE technology [as] a continuation of genocide upon indigenous people and as malicious and sacrilegious acts toward our ancestry, culture, and future generations.”

In more recent years, the Albuquerque-based non-profit Cuatro Puertas promoted the Farmer Protection Act (FPA) with the goal of legally protecting farmers who had inadvertently grown seed that had contaminated their fields without their knowledge. The legislation drove at whether the state should solidify a corporation’s right to control a seed stock or allow the new commodity to revert back to the commons. The biotech industry heavily lobbied the legislature and the FPA was killed in the state Congress in 2009, 2010, and 2011.

The industry countered this growing hostility among New Mexicans to GE chile:  they publicized flagging production and insinuated that drastic measures (without referring directly to GE chile) were necessary. They opened a website called savenmchile.com, and one major processor launched a “New Mexican Grown” campaign, which encouraged consumers to buy only chile grown in New Mexico (despite the fact that this producer sold other products, without the New Mexican grown label, made with Mexican chile). Thus, the industry both worked with Mexico to compete globally and antagonized Mexico publicly to compete locally.

WHEN THE BUMPY ROAD SPLIT, I turned left and drove through a canyon to an old overgrown rock corral. I passed several border patrolmen along the way, each of whom stopped his SUV and rolled down his window. I asked one if it was safe for me to hike around here. “Oh yeah,” he said without hesitation, “did you see those helicopters?  They were chasing six mules. They broke up and now we’re looking for them.  But yeah, you’re fine.”

I WALKED DOWN into the canyon, and before long I began to hear voices. I decided not to be stealthy and approached the sounds. I found a camp of hunters who asked in Spanish if I needed water as I approached. No, I said in English, I’ve got plenty of water. I told them about my object of pursuit, and the old-timer of the bunch raised his eyebrows. “I had a chiltepin plant growing in my yard for a few years. Beautiful plants,” he said. Then, almost to himself, “I cut it down years ago.”

I wished them luck and continued up the canyon. I hiked several hours through beautiful canyon country that day, but found no chile. My spirits were sinking with the sun. I was coming to terms with the possibility that my pilgrimage to the wild chile could lack the chile.

The next day, however, I decided to give it one more shot. This time I would not follow the washes and canyons. I would head up into the hills.  The dry and scrabbly terrain seemed an unlikely place for chiles, but I couldn’t leave without trying.

I had hiked for about an hour when I saw the first specks of red dotting a small bush beneath a palo verde. At this point I had had enough false alarms to keep my hopes down. As I approached, my heart jumped. I removed one of the berries and squirted its juice into my mouth. A pang of fire lit my tongue, and a lightness  overtook my body. I could barely believe it. Over the course of the next few hours I traversed the quarter mile surrounding this plant and found five more.

As I sat with the chiltepin, Robert Frost’s “There are Roughly Zones” came to mind.  Frost watches as a particularly cold night takes its toll on a peach tree he has planted on his New England land. There are zones where a peach can survive, and Frost knows he has been pushing it. The poem asserts that borders within nature and morality are nebulous and rough, yet nonetheless exist. What is it, Frost asks, in our hearts and minds that compels us to continually push and test these lines?

Frost wrote the poem just years before the onset of the Green Revolution, when technological breakthroughs would allow for a previously unimaginable scale of agriculture. Frost likely would have taken an interest in the questions surrounding the industrial chile. How many contiguous acres are too many? How many miles is too far for a frozen chile to fly? How far from Hatch, New Mexico, does a Hatch chile cease to be a Hatch chile? And, perhaps most importantly, does splicing patented Roundup Ready genes into a plant genome transgress both natural and moral boundaries?

Frost’s philosophical musing on boundaries seemed apt as my eyes gazed over Mexico from the northernmost wild chile stand in the United States. I was standing along a rougher, much older boundary, where the very presence of the chiles exposes the rigid national border as a mere abstraction. •

 To learn more about the chile industry in New Mexico, see The Hot Empire of Chile (2000) by Kent Paterson. For more on the chiltepin, see Chasing Chiles: Hot Spots Along the Pepper Trail (2011) by Kurt Michael Friese, Kraig Kraft and Gary Paul Nabhan. For more on GE chile, see www.savenmseeds.org.

WILLIAM CARLETON is a Ph.D. student in history at The University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where he focuses on environmental and agricultural history of the American West.  When he is not at school, he co-manages a three-acre urban vegetable farm that he helped to found.