Grievances, everyday annoyances, unexpected sorrows. A loved one leaves by choice or by a visit from the Grim Reaper. A financial burden turns life upside down. Even a flat tire at the wrong time can send someone over the emotional edge. It’s no wonder we annually feel an urgent need to make New Year’s resolutions, hoping for better outcomes.

What if there were a ritual for releasing the woes, anxieties, and grief that plague us despite our best intentions? Santa Fe, New Mexico, “the City Different,” has such a tradition. Known to locals as the city’s own special New Year, the Burning of Zozobra, the original burning man who predates the Black Rock City effigy by 60 years, is our way to let go of worries and sorrow and make a fresh start.

In 1917, Will Shuster, a Philadelphia artist who worked for the Curtis Publishing Company, answered the World War I call of duty. Sent to France to organize and command an Army Message Center, he endured sleepless nights, emergency rations, and muddy trenches before being mustard gassed for his efforts. Returning home in 1919, Shuster received a diagnosis of tuberculosis, generally considered terminal in that era. His doctor noted that Shuster could stay in Philadelphia and live for perhaps a year, or he could head west to a place where he would “probably die of old age, snake bite or drinking too much bad whiskey.” Shuster took his doctor’s advice, packed up the family and moved to Santa Fe, where he proceeded to live for 50 fulfilling years.

In New Mexico, Shuster became part of a self-titled group known as Los Cinco Pintores (the Five Painters), locally christened as the “five nuts in huts,” a pointed comment on their side-by-side self-built adobe abodes and their financial challenges. When one member of the group sold a painting, all benefited from the proceeds. After one such 1923 sale, Shuster insisted that the group blow the money on a Christmas Eve night out at the new La Fonda hotel bar. Frustrated by listening to his friends’ grousing, Shuster demanded that they write down their gloomy thoughts on paper, then put the papers into a bowl and set them on fire. Though they were promptly tossed out of the bar, the act became a kindling of an idea that ignited the following year after Shuster found inspiration on a trip to Mexico during Easter time.

Accompanied by E. Dana Johnson, a prominent Santa Fe journalist and editor, while traveling Shuster witnessed a Holy Week tradition in which an effigy of Judas was paraded around a village on a donkey as people threw shoes and hissed at it. Shuster was struck by how the crowd united in solidarity against the torment and despair that the Judas figure represented. Recalling how it felt burning his gloom with his friends at La Fonda the year before, he married the two memories into a unique whole. That fall, in September 1924, he built his own 6-foot-tall effigy, filled it with glooms written on paper, and burned it in his back yard. At first, Shuster referred to the effigy as Old Man Groucher, but he and Johnson ultimately settled on naming it Zozobra, a Spanish word denoting anxiety or gloom.

From the start, Shuster was adamant that Zozobra was not a political or religious figure but instead a manifestation of the negativity that humans experience, the sorrows and hurts we inflict upon ourselves and others. By letting those thoughts and feelings be consumed in the flames that consumed Zozobra, he hoped that the tradition would help people cleanse themselves of the gloom, regrets, and sadness they carried.

Zozobra is a relative youngster in the history of Santa Fe, which boasts the oldest U.S. capitol, but the burning of a functional marionette has already become a cherished local cultural tradition, part of the personal story of countless families. Schools create Zozobra lesson plans, and people who have helped with Zozobra’s construction, stuffed it with shredded paper, or performed in the accompanying pageant ignite the same fire for participation in their own children. It’s not unusual to hear kids recite the color of Zozobra’s hair in years before they were born, and on Halloween, it’s common to see a little Zozobra at the door.

In 1964, Shuster gifted the nonprofit Kiwanis Club of Santa Fe with the rights to Zozobra. In keeping with the Kiwanis’ mission, the Santa Fe club donates net proceeds from the event to help fund local organizations that work to make life better for children. A lifelong lover of Zozobra, I’ve served as its event chair since 2012, taking over from Ray Valdez, who oversaw the burning of Old Man Gloom for more than two decades.

Courtesy of Zócalo Public Square.

We’re proud to have over 70,000 people flock to Fort Marcy Park to take part in the annual burning of Zozobra. The narrative plays out the same way every time: Ostensibly invited to a party in his honor, Zozobra, also known as Old Man Gloom, gleefully attends the festivities, intent on robbing Santa Fe of its hope and happiness. Using his dark forces to cloud the minds of Santa Fe’s children, portrayed by local students, he turns these innocents into “Gloomies”—minions he can use to wreak havoc on the city. But as Zozobra and his Gloomies prematurely celebrate his intended triumph, a group of torch bearers representing townsfolk appear to counter the spreading gloom. Zozobra and the Gloomies frighten the torchbearers away. But just when it looks as though all is lost, the watching crowd begins to chant “Burn him, Burn him!”

This impassioned cry summons a Fire Spirit, who materializes to battle with Zozobra for the soul of the city. The annual clash between good and evil ends when the Fire Spirit’s flaming torches signal Zozobra’s demise under a blaze of fireworks, said by Shuster to be his way of painting the sky. United in the spiritual balm of releasing anguish and heartbreak, those witnessing this spectacle celebrate as the 50-foot-tall effigy and their sorrows become glowing embers, clearing the emotional air.

Over the past few years of devastating losses and trauma, the purging of grief that Zozobra provides has meant more than ever. While the wounds we suffer, both external and internal, never really disappear, the fellowship and goodwill that call forth the Fire Spirit serve as a reminder that, as humans, we can help one another heal the emotional burdens we carry.

The return of gloom is inevitable, as is the need to vanquish all that Zozobra represents. Because what is Zozobra but a manifestation of the spiritual struggle between light and darkness, played out in an annual drama?

Inspired by the promise made to Zozobra’s creator to present this pageant in perpetuity, Kiwanis’ commitment to the tradition is unwavering. Our volunteers are already making preparations to get next year’s ritual underway, readying Old Man Gloom to help us with sorrows to come. Zozobra will burn again.

The post How Zozobra, the Original Burning Man, Became Santa Fe’s ‘New Year’ Tradition appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Today, the pardoning of the national Thanksgiving turkey is an annual White House staple, complete with TV crews capturing the live pageantry. But this pomp and circumstance surrounding the pardon masks the larger question: Why we are granting clemency or extending mercy to turkeys in the first place?

A pardon entails the waiving of a punishment and the restoring of one’s civil liberties, while a reprieve delays imposition of a sentence or punishment (often because the sentence or punishment is seen as unjust given the crime). Importantly, none of these actions erase the guilt of the person to whom it’s being granted. But turkeys cannot commit crimes. And so the purpose of the president pardoning a turkey (or two) right before Thanksgiving only serves to mask the realities faced by those particular turkeys, and for that matter, most turkeys in the U.S.

Commercially bred turkeys grow quickly and produce a lot of meat, especially breast meat. Their large breasts make natural mating difficult, so they are bred through artificial insemination, and their eggs are placed in an incubator to hatch. Neither the process of collecting semen nor the process of insemination is done gently. The chicks hatch in batches of 10,000.  They are usually debeaked, desnooded, detoed, and have their spurs trimmed so they won’t harm one another as they grow in barns crowded with 7,000 to 10,000 birds. They remain in light at all times to promote eating and growth, reaching their slaughter weight in three to four months.

The U.S. produces about 250 million such turkeys each year. One or two of them are “pardoned,” and are generally sent to an animal sanctuary to live out their lives. But those lives tend to be fairly short. These turkeys usually have to be kept on special diets (which may well leave them hungry most of the time) in order to slow their growth and prolong their lives. If they are allowed to eat normally, they will grow too large for their bones and legs. Given that they have been bred for maximum growth and early maturity, it is not clear that the “pardon” is in the interest of the turkeys. It seems to be about making humans feel better about themselves before they sit down to a Thanksgiving meal.

The Thanksgiving holiday is fraught with hypocrisy and outright brutality. The fate of turkeys in what is now the U.S. is to be a brutalized commercial product that symbolizes a meal of peace that masks the brutality of European settlement here and the genocidal policies that attempted, but did not succeed, in wiping Native people completely off the map. Turkeys are linked to this history; indigenous to the Americas and first domesticated by Native Americans, they played an important role as food and as a religious sacrifice for many Indigenous peoples. But European colonists overhunted wild turkeys and continuously pushed them off their native habitats. By 1930, only a few hundred thousand wild turkeys were left.

Colonists also took turkeys back to Europe—kept in narrow cages and often force fed—where they became a popular food item, particularly for the Christmas holiday. With continued European immigration to the U.S., turkeys became a common food bird here as well. The American meat industry began breeding and raising them in ways that ignored their naturally seasonal reproductive patterns, denied their natural patterns of eating and movement, and showed no respect for their social and inquisitive way of being.

At the same time that the annual numbers of commercially raised turkeys were moving from tens of millions (1940s) to hundreds of millions of birds (1960s), efforts to reintroduce turkeys to the “wild” also started to take hold. But this work was not done for the sake of the turkeys or to make amends for hunting them nearly to extinction. It was done, like many American wildlife restoration efforts, so that turkey hunting could once again be a popular and profitable activity.  Many wildlife restoration efforts in the U.S. owe their success to the fact that hunters wanted to hunt them. The 1937 Federal Aid in Wildlife Restoration Act taxed hunting guns and ammunition to fund wildlife restoration efforts. For turkeys these reintroduction efforts were successful, and by 1950, there were about 500,000 “wild,” or more accurately, free-living turkeys in the U.S. By 1973, that number was estimated to be 1.5 million, and in 2005 it reached 7 million. Ironically, it was the ready supply of commercial turkey meat that allowed for the successful reintroduction of free-living turkeys. Since there was such a robust supply of commercially bred turkeys for the dinner table, for lunch meat, and for burgers, the hunting pressure could be removed from the free-living birds and allow them to recover.

While free-living turkeys spend up to five months with their mothers, learning a lot about where to find food and how not to be food for others, domesticated commercial turkeys never know their (or any) mother. They don’t range over territories, mate, brood, or find their own food. They end their very short lives by being tightly packed into crates and shipped to a slaughterhouse, where they are hung upside down while still alive. Most are slaughtered by being electrified, then having their throats slit, but if they are not the standard size, they may survive these measures. This results in live birds being dunked in scalding water before they are defeathered. Given that the turkeys have been living in their own excrement, the slaughter process often promotes the spread of disease. Turkey meat is regularly recalled due to salmonella and listeria contamination. The commercial production of turkeys has a detrimental impact on the environment and harms human health through the consumption of contaminated meat and through air and water pollution.

It seems that the human commercialization and mass consumption of turkeys is a crime that needs our attention, and not a pardon. The poultry industry is guilty of overusing antibiotics, creating toxic amounts of manure, polluting waterways and killing fish, polluting the air, and forcing a painful and unnatural life and death on hundreds of millions of turkeys each year in the U.S. alone. As we rethink the myths this country was built on, it’s a good time to reflect on the crimes we are all complicit in as well.

The post What Crime Does the Thanksgiving Turkey Answer For? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

With all the hefty issues affecting us (immigration reform, education equity, the fate of DREAMers, the increasing incarceration of Latino youth), I couldn’t believe they’d choose such a Latino-lite topic as the made-in-the-USA quinceañera! Struggling immigrant families were “throwing the house out the window” with expenditures way beyond their means. There were now cruises, Disney World packages, pricey dresses for the girl and her court, party motivators. The tradition had lost its way from its origins: a ceremonial time, culminating in a fiesta, in which the elders of a community transmit their wisdom and skills to the next generation.

Despite my qualms, I accepted the assignment precisely to understand what happens to our origin traditions when they arrive stateside. What aspects of the quinceañera should we retain in order to take better care of our young people in their new culture and country?

Like many traditions in America, the quinceañera is a syncretization of indigenous and European influences. After years of preparation by their elders, Aztec maidens were considered ready for marriage at the age of 15, at which juncture, there was a ritual. The Aztec Codex cites ceremonial speeches given by fathers and mothers to their daughters:

It is as if you were an herb, a plant that has propagated, sprouted, blossomed. It is also as if you had been asleep and have awakened . . .

The ritual marked that awakening: the girl becoming a woman, and in the male counterpart of the rite, a boy becoming a man.

With the conquest, the Aztec tradition was subsumed by the Spaniards, who introduced details from the courtrooms of Europe and their coming-of-age balls when girls were presented to society, including elements that are very much a part of the current celebration: the opening waltz, the girl’s tiara, her court of young attendants. As with any living tradition, details were added over time: The girl got a “last doll” as a symbol of the babies she would bear; the court was set at 14 couples to represent the quinceañeras’ past birthdays; the father (more and more in combination with the mother) changed her girlish slippers to heels and after the first dance handed her over to her escort. But at the root of all these elaborations, the tradition represents an age-old need in the life of a community to signal the transfer of power to the next generation, a rite of passage, culminating in a party.

This aspect of the tradition has been criticized—as it should be when it turns show-offy and debt-inducing. But we must not dismiss or demean our traditions because they do not fit another culture’s idea of what is appropriate. We of Latin American heritage are a fiesta-loving people, Octavio Paz reminds us in The Labyrinth of Solitude. “Our poverty can be measured by the frequency and luxuriousness of our holidays. Fiestas are our only luxury. What is sought is potency, life, health. In this sense the fiesta is one of the most ancient economic forms.”

This might not always make sound Americanized dollars and sense, but our origin cultures often recall us to priorities and values we mustn’t forget. The resources embedded in traditions have become scarce in the developed world. In fact, this was one of the findings of a global study of world problems by the United Nations for the new millennium. Young people in developed countries were suffering from “rite deprivation.” They were adrift without a sense of their roots, of a community that cared and supported them, of traditions that connected them meaningfully with their past and empowered them in their journey into the future.

Young people in this country are telling us this is so. Teens are taking to the streets, marching in favor of gun control. DREAMers are waking up to how they are being held hostage by an administration more interested in the crazed whims of a madman in the White House and poll numbers than in nurturing the next generation of immigrant Americans. Young people are letting us know: you are not taking good enough care of us.

It’s time we listened to them. One of the epigraphs of my book is a Plato aphorism that guided my thinking about the quinceañera: “Education is teaching our children to desire the right things.” More and more what is happening is that our children are teaching us.

“The earth is not given to us by our ancestors,” according to a Native American saying, “It is loaned to us by our children.”

The quinceañera tradition reminds us that our loan is coming due. Of course, traditions must be constantly reinvented so that they serve who we are now. Back in another century, the quinceañera was about empowering our young girls, helping them adopt their adult roles of wife and mother. This was the only option back then. By showcasing the young girl, the quinceañera helped her find a good match and get a good start in life. But in this new country, young women have a lot more options. How can we use the quinceañera tradition to truly support our young people as they journey into adulthood in the here and now?

One of the most encouraging responses to this challenge is the Stay-in-School Quinceañera Program started by a Latina mom in Idaho. Over the course of a full year, 14-year-old girls and boys learn about their culture, old country traditions, as well as the new opportunities in this country. They meet with a range of leaders in the community: the Latina judge; the abuelita who knows homeopathic remedies, and the traditional craft of making wax flowers; the ranch-hand vaquero/cowboy who follows a true caballero (vs. macho) code of honor in caring for his familia and comunidad; the Latino CEO who runs a software company. There are field trips and retreats, community service projects and plain old fun.

Gaby, a graduate of the program, told me she would never have stayed in school, still less gone to college, if she hadn’t enrolled in the program. As the oldest of eight kids in an undocumented migrant family, Gaby was needed at home to help with her younger siblings. “I never thought of going to college. I was like your typical Hispanic girl.”

“What do you mean by that?” I asked her.

“Oh, you know, we don’t do white girl things like go to college.”

The Stay-at-School Quinceañera Program had put a new story in her head about what was possible for her.

I’ve been thinking a lot about Gaby, especially because she is one of those DREAMers now threatened with deportation. How to help her and others on their journeys into adulthood? How to create new narratives in their heads—and, maybe more importantly, in our own heads—about what is possible?

In other words, there are stories inside us about who we can be and what we can do, and these stories drive our lives. Which is exactly why it’s so important to expand the pool of stories.

The post What Quinceañeras Can Teach Adults—as Well as Young Girls—About Values appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Scherman’s impassioned farewell created something of a stir—but he was not the first and certainly not the last of the music’s obituarists who erred in assuming that cultures and cultural forms survive by resisting change rather than accommodating it.

While the very name of “country” music emphasizes its cultural roots, it’s been shaped by commerce from the outset. The ballads and fiddle tunes favored by early emigrants from the British Isles might have constituted “folk music,” but by the end of the 19th century, as music writer Francis Davis observed, what a visiting folklorist might have seized on as “a supposedly authorless … song learned by ear for generations” could well have been picked up recently from a touring vaudevillian.

Even though early 20th-century country music pioneers—like A. P. Carter of the famed Carter Family—played and sang songs from an oral tradition stretching several centuries deep into British history and culture, they were not purist collectors but professional performers who often reconfigured awkward chords and arcane lyrics into a mix more palatable to live audiences and record producers.

Jimmie Rodgers, who is widely recognized today as “The Father of Country Music,” was one of the most truly innovative artists in American musical history. Rodgers made his recording breakthrough in July 1927, only five years after the first commercial country music record appeared. Punctuating his bluesy, black-sounding vocals with the melodic yodeling style he had learned from a traveling Swiss troupe, he also incorporated the Hawaiian steel guitar and the jazz trumpet of Louis Armstrong into recordings like his famous “Blue Yodel No. 9.” Though his life was cut tragically short by tuberculosis in 1933, his records sold 12 million copies over a six-year span.

Rodgers also led the way as country performers shucked their overalls in favor of the more romantic garb of the cowboy already popularized on the silver screen, a makeover embraced by recording executives who feared that the old “hillbilly” image was too evocative of the daily drudgery and deprivation of the Great Depression.

The Second World War brought some relief from that poverty, and changed the music in the process. The massive infusion of some $9 billion in wartime federal spending suddenly had the South sprouting not only military bases and defense plants but drinking and dancing establishments eager to relieve the locals of their newfound ready cash. These “honky tonks” (think “Bob’s Country Bunker” in The Blues Brothers) presented some new musical challenges, chiefly that of simply penetrating the din of dancing, rattling beer bottles, and drunken conversation. In such raucous settings, the softer vocals and acoustic guitars of the old hillbilly string bands quickly proved no match for amplified instruments and the transcendent twang of the pedal steel guitar.

“Honky Tonk” music’s distinct sound came with place-appropriate lyrics, sometimes celebrating the fleeting but intense pleasures of a good buzz, but dwelling more often on the pangs of guilt and loss occasioned by habitual drunkenness, adulterous assignations, and dimly lit barroom romances that could not survive the light of day.

Honky Tonk’s themes were the stock-in-trade of performers like Ernest Tubb, whose 1941 rendition of “Walking the Floor Over You” became an instant classic. But they reached their apotheosis a few years later in the music of Hank Williams.

As befit the most quintessentially “country” performer of all time, Williams’ emotionally powerful songs seemed wholly genuine in the context of his tragic life. Yet his music was a subtle blend of hillbilly, honky tonk, and black instrumental and vocal influences. And some of his physical gestures and gyrations foreshadowed the performing style that would later establish Elvis Aron Presley as the “King of Rock ‘n’ Roll.”

With America’s teens buying rock ‘n’ roll hits by the fistful, Nashville recording gurus Owen Bradley and Chet Atkins set out to woo their frazzled parents with the notably de-twanged’ “Nashville Sound,” marked by soothing background vocals and smooth string arrangements where a single fiddle gave way to a chorus of violins. Featuring the silky vocals of artists like Jim Reeves and Patsy Cline, here was an “easy listening” version of country music tailored for crossing over into the mainstream adult pop market.

The music had been reinvented yet again, and, once more, rather than destroy country music tradition, this innovation would simply enter into it. “Crazy” and “I Fall to Pieces,” two of Patsy Cline’s biggest “crossover” hits in the pop market, now occupy the second and fourth spots respectively in About Country’s ranking of the top 500 country songs of all time. Reeves’s “He’ll Have to Go” rests at number nine. Not bad for a sound that hardcore honky-tonker Ernest Tubb declared inauthentic on arrival, allowing they could “do what they want to, but don’t call it country.”

Tubb might seem a bit out of place in anything resembling a Hegelian dialectic. But in echoing what others had said about his own reworked rendition of country music scarcely a generation earlier, he joined an ongoing process of interaction where each successive departure from tradition both provoked and shaped a counter-response. In this case the Nashville Sound brought forth the “neo-honky tonk” style of George Jones and later the “Bakersfield Sound” of Buck Owens and Merle Haggard.

Much of the anxiety about changes in country music stems from its remarkably rapid transition from marginal cultural product to the perceived embodiment of fundamental American values. Such changes appeared to reach warp speed by the 1990s as Garth Brooks ditched long necks for piña coladas and blitzed the touring scene with concert extravaganzas that made the Super Bowl halftime show look like a third-grade Christmas pageant. Then Canadian-born Shania Twain took “crossover” to a new level, scoring big on the international as well as domestic pop charts with songs like “C’est La Vie,” which borrowed heavily from one-time Europop sensation ABBA’s “Dancing Queen.” In protest, fed-up neo-traditionalists Alan Jackson and George Strait took center stage at the Academy of Country Music Awards Ceremony in 1999 for a duet bemoaning the “murder” of real country music down on Nashville’s “Music Row.” This somber pronouncement, mind you, came a full decade before the glaringly genre-ambivalent Taylor Swift began a 10-year run in which she was nominated for 26 Country Music Association Awards and won 12 of them.

Because of their interactive nature, clashes between the would-be challengers and defenders of tradition have inevitably led to syntheses of the two approaches, meaning the boundaries of what truly constitutes “mainstream” country music have been in constant flux for most of its history and never more so than now.

Today’s “bro country,” for example, is both hailed as the last great hope for keeping the “country” message in country music and condemned for rendering that message meaningless and superficial. Bro country combines hip-hop, country rock, and frequently—heaven help us!—electronic vocal tuning, with formulaic lyrics dedicated to hot women (preferably in cutoffs), drinking, partying, and most critically, fancy pickup trucks. Accordingly, Luke Bryan’s “That’s My Kind of Night” celebrates listening to “a country rock hip-hop mix tape” while sitting with your girl on the “diamond plate tailgate” of a “big black jacked up truck.”

Early country music fans would surely puzzle over Bryan’s desire to flee the cushy confines of suburbia for a few hours out in the boondocks with his new girlfriend in his garishly over-optioned pickup. But then, back in 1920, 75 percent of Southerners still lived in the countryside, while roughly the same portion today reside in metropolitan areas. Nor are today’s country music followers facing the grinding poverty so familiar to their great-grandparents: With Nielsen surveys showing median household incomes approximately 26 percent higher than the national average, country fans have little trouble swinging loans for luxuriously appointed trucks.

With pickups the nation’s best-selling vehicles, and commercials for them rife with country soundtracks and performers, it’s pretty clear that both Nashville and Detroit understand that the same folks are buttering their respective biscuits. Ironically enough, critics who focus on how far country music has moved away from what it was when first recorded nearly a century ago are in a real sense simply affirming how remarkably attuned it has remained to its ever-evolving base.

The post How Nashville ‘Killed’ Traditional Country Music—and Then Reinvented It appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

On Cranberry Day, we gather to eat, drink, and celebrate together. It’s a day for remembering and maintaining a way of life. The Aquinnah Wampanoag is a small tribe, with a membership of approximately 1,300, which makes remembrance even more important. Despite contemporary technology, Aquinnah Wampanoags are oral people, and it is up to the Elders to carry our stories, ceremonies, and traditions forward. My grandmother used to say, “if you show up at a tribal function and you are the oldest one there then you are an Elder.”

Cranberry Day has been a big holiday for the Aquinnah Wampanoag people for a long time. Tribal children are excused from school. Relatives come from the mainland. Families prepare food for days. There might be chowder, various kinds of fish, clam fritters, stuffers—stuffed quahogs, or hard-shell clams —and potato bargain, a dish made of potatoes and salt pork that was called “bargain” because potatoes and salt pork used to be especially economical. Also blueberry slump, which is like a cobbler; Johnny cake; and my favorite, seaweed pudding—made from boiling native seaweed, which coagulates and forms a custard all on its own.

The Aquinnah Wampanoag Tribe celebrate Cranberry Day each year on Noepe, also known as Martha’s Vineyard. Photo by Beverly Wright.

On Cranberry Day we make a bonfire, eat, and pick cranberries. Cranberry bogs form in the lowlands between sand dunes, where the fruit grows on low-lying vines in bogs or marshes layered with sand, peat, clay, and fresh water. Windy days can leave a layer of sand from the dune which stunts the growth of weeds and prevents insect infestations. The bogs are owned by the tribe as part of our trust lands. Only tribal members can pick there. Our tribe has been tending some bogs and vines for over two hundred years. Long ago, Elders decided that the bogs would not be commercialized—that is, not be weeded and flooded and otherwise manipulated to create a bigger crop, as Ocean Spray or other commercial growers do. This means that some years there are no cranberries and the next year the bogs overflow. The Great Spirit takes care of it.

In past years most of the cranberries we picked would be sold on the mainland to supplement tribal families’ income. But today, most people freeze the berries to use over the winter for cranberry bread, sauce, pies, chutney, tea, and jelly—plus, stringing cranberry garlands for the Christmas tree. You don’t even have to freeze them. My grandmother would keep cranberries “under the eaves” in the attic, where it was just cold enough that cranberries would keep. All winter she would say, “Go under the eaves and get me a couple of cups of cranberries.”

Cranberries form an important part of New England history. Wampanoag men have always been great sea warriors, sea captains, and harpooners—Tashtego in Moby Dick is a Wampanoag. Whaling vessels would store barrels of cranberries below deck for the long voyages. Cranberries are a good source of vitamin C and would help stave off scurvy.

My earliest memory of Cranberry Day comes from when I was five or six. I was allowed to stand at the roadside early in the morning before the sun was up with my cousins and wait for one of my relatives, Jack Belain, to come along with his team of oxen and cart. He would pick up all the kids along the road and then cut off at the cow path over the sand dunes, past the blueberry bushes and beach plum bushes, and come out at the cranberry bogs. As kids we were glad to get there early before the grown-ups arrived so we could pick out our spot on top of the dune for the cranberry races.

Races began after lunch, when we children had eaten our full. The crust of a sand dune makes an excellent racetrack. We would look for the biggest round cranberries and pick our partners. Whoever was at the top would roll the cranberry down and the partner at the bottom would catch the berry and throw it back to the top. The race would usually end when someone fell down the dune and broke the crust.

These days, we still meet at the bogs early in the morning but mostly come by car. Tribal members live all over the country. Some can’t return for Cranberry Day. I always send a box of fresh picked berries to my grandson in Denver.

And since the town is no longer home to only tribal members, we invite our neighbors to a potluck dinner at our community center at the end of Cranberry Day. The harvest of the day is on full display. We drum, sing, and dance and offer blessings to the Creator for the harvest and hope for the next year.

At night, Elders tell stories about our history and our home.

The post Every October, on Martha’s Vineyard, We Celebrate Cranberry Day appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The National Institutes of Health recently announced that it plans to end the ban on funding research for part-human, part-animal embryos, raising urgent ethical questions such as, what if this produces an animal with a partly human brain?

But the origins of these very modern concerns date back more than a century, with lively discussions about “modernization” underway as early as the Paris World’s Fair of 1900. One especially compelling yet largely forgotten analysis was penned by Henry Adams, son of a congressman and diplomat, descendant of two U.S. presidents, and a highly regarded historian—and conflicted technology enthusiast—in his own right. His reflections were contained in his posthumously published autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams.

In a chapter titled “The Dynamo and the Virgin,” he ponders the implications of the Machine Age, expressing deep concern over what he sees as a dangerous clash between the seductive grandeur of modern science and technology, which he calls “the Dynamo,” and the essential undergirdings of humanity—religion and traditional values—which he christens “the Virgin.”

More introspective than descriptive, The Education of Henry Adams was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1919. It leads the Modern Library’s list of the top 100 English-language nonfiction books of the 20th century, outranking Booker T. Washington’s Up From Slavery, Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, and Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring.

Today, Adams’s work is not nearly as widely known as those, but not for lack of merit and timeliness. Indeed one could argue that “The Dynamo and the Virgin” is even more relevant today than it was when it was written.

After studying exhibitions on art, science, and technology at the Paris World’s Fair of 1900, Adams concluded that—despite his own appreciation of the merits of “progress”—Americans were too ready to embrace new technology at the cost of traditional values. This raised for him a disquieting question for the dawning century: Will the human spirit survive the new Age of the Machine?

Adams was anxious that American culture was about to take a fateful turn, sacrificing traditional values on the altar of technology. Prompting his reflections was a visit to the Hall of Electrical Machines. He fixated in particular on one of the gigantic dynamos on display. Its purpose was beside the point. Adams’s focus—and his fear—centered on its size and mechanism, its “huge wheel, revolving within arm’s-length at some vertiginous speed” while making hardly a sound. Its workings, he wrote, were an unfathomable, but seductive, mystery—one that left him in awe. The dynamo became for him the incarnation of modernity and symbol of the “revolution of 1900”—interwoven revolutions in science and technology that ushered in, most impressively, the new age of electricity along with automated production, the car, and the airplane.

Henry Adams seated at his desk, 1883. Courtesy of Marian Hooper Adams/Wikimedia Commons.

And then there was the art. Adams contrasted the dynamo with the figure of the Virgin, which he suggested was the central inspiration behind much of what he had viewed in the fair’s acclaimed art pavilions. The Virgin became his symbol for Christian tradition and, equated by Adams to the Roman mythological Venus, the female force in general. Looking to the future, he wondered if the god of technology, the dynamo’s apotheosis, was on the verge of replacing, as he put it, the Church and the Cross. Adams was in fact seeking a middle ground between religion and science.

Adams’s guide through the Hall of Electrical Machines was a leading American scientist, S. P. Langley, Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution. Although holding Langley in the highest esteem, he wrote of being puzzled, and a bit disturbed, by the scientist’s laser-like focus on machines and forces, to the exclusion of the art displays and all else non-scientific at the fair: “Langley, with the ease of a great master of experiment, threw out of the field every exhibit that did not reveal a new application of force, and naturally threw out, to begin with, almost the whole art exhibit.”

Adams, writing in the third person about his experiences, described how Langley taught him to appreciate, if not really understand, recent discoveries in radioactivity, radio, and electricity: “He [Adams] wrapped himself in vibrations and rays which were new, and he would have hugged Marconi and Branly [inventor of the Branly coherer, one of the earliest radio wave detectors] had he met them, as he hugged the dynamo.”

Long fascinated by modern physics, Adams later experimented with applying physical theories, including the Second Law of Thermodynamics, Entropy, and “Maxwell’s Demon” (a thermodynamic thought-experiment by physicist James Clerk Maxwell), to the theory of human history, even in the face of skeptical feedback from scientist friends. But it was the dynamo that excited his strongest reactions at the Paris fair: “As he grew accustomed to the great gallery of machines, he began to feel the 40-foot dynamos as a moral force, much as the early Christians felt the Cross … Before the end, one began to pray to it.”

Indeed, Adams later did pray to it, composing a poetic tribute, “Prayer to the Dynamo: Mysterious Power! Gentle Friend! Despotic Master! Tireless Force!” he wrote, with more than a hint of ambivalence.

The rush of discoveries in science and technology sometimes left him longing for the solace of tradition, security, and unity that he associated with medieval society and the Church. That people now seemed to be turning away from the Virgin worried him, for he believed it could mean the end of the great artistic traditions that were propelled by the power of Christian faith, “the highest energy ever known to man,” surpassing even the power of the steam engine and the dynamo.

Adams noted that in Europe the “force of the Virgin was still felt at Lourdes, and seemed to be as potent as X-rays,” while “in America neither Venus nor Virgin ever had value as force.” Despite his personal religious skepticism, (he was attracted to religion, but remained agnostic, never really reconciling the truths of science and religious faith) he regretted that his countrymen were apparently throwing in their lot with the machine worshippers.

So, what does Adams have to say to us today as we confront the dilemmas of our own technological revolution? Adams was enthusiastic about modern science and technology—today we might refer to him as an early adopter—but he remained an essentially 19th-century man, mindful of the challenges to society posed by 20th-century technology. His hope was that dynamo and Virgin would ultimately join together in support of both our spiritual and material lives.

To be sure, we no longer speak of dynamos and Virgins, much less of “hugging dynamos.” Yet, in many ways, Adams was extraordinarily prescient. With today’s advances in artificial intelligences and genetic manipulation, we face the very existential crisis that Adams foresaw.

Precisely one hundred years after Adams’s toured the Paris Exposition of 1900, Bill Joy, co-founder and former Chief Scientist of Sun Microsystems, wrote his now famous essay in Wired magazine, “Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us,” projecting a dystopian future in which “our most powerful 21st-century technologies—robotics, genetic engineering, and nanotech—are threatening to make humans an endangered species.” Adams was not half so gloomy as Joy. From the vantage of the revolution of 1900, he welcomed our technological future, but with a crucial caveat: make sure our technology has a soul, not in the sense of superseding us as sentient human beings, but of living in spiritual harmony with our better selves.

The post The 1900 World’s Fair Produced Dazzling Dynamos, Great Art, and Our Current Conversation About Technology appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I was born and raised on the Navajo Tribal Reservation, where my grandparents plied traditional knowledge but at the same time shared with me the importance of a white man’s way of life. In this day and age, they told me, finding a balance between the two is crucial to your own path. But it wasn’t until I left the reservation that I came to understand my purpose as a Diné woman.

Growing up I experienced both cultures every day—sometimes separately, sometimes tightly interwoven, like the strands of wool in a Diné blanket. At school I learned Western ideology. Meanwhile my grandparents, our family’s keepers of the Diné legacy, imparted Navajo history and culture, taught me that I am born to the Tachii’nii clan (Red Running into the Water, my mother’s clan), and born for the Ti’aashcí’í clan (Red Bottom People, the clan of my father). On Sundays we worshipped at a Christian reform church, where sermons, spoken in the Navajo language, gave thanks to both the Creator of Life and the Lord Jesus Christ.

The Navajo Nation, whose settlement in the Four Corners of the Colorado Plateau extends back centuries before Christopher Columbus, is today by far America’s largest Indian tribe, with more than a million members—some identified by tribal status, others through family clanship. Diné Bikéyah, or Navajoland, encompasses more than 27,000 square miles across Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico—larger than 10 of the 50 states.

My parents grew up around policies created by the U.S. government and other settlers to eradicate Indian culture. They met at Intermountain Indian Boarding School, where, they told me, they were compelled to embrace Western ways of life and avoid Indian culture because it would not help them or their children.

But they made a conscious effort to maintain their traditional identities, even as circumstances compelled them to adapt to western social norms. They eventually married in a traditional Navajo wedding ceremony on the reservation, but later moved to Oakland, California, as part of the federal Indian Relocation Act of 1956. However, jobs were scarce in the city and my parents soon moved back to the reservation, which is where I spent my formative years.

Peters with her grandmother, who passed away in 2008.

My mother’s path was to be a caretaker of our people, working as a dorm aide at a local boarding school for the Bureau of Indian Affairs, which also entitled our family to subsidized housing. The place was small—my parents in one bedroom, one of my sisters and her husband and daughter in the other room, and me on the old couch. But it was homey.

The decor reflected my parents’ personalities. The corners were stacked high with copies of the Navajo Times that my dad never wanted to throw away. Blankets were piled throughout the house, my mom’s way of letting visitors know that despite close quarters there was always a comfortable place for guests to lay their heads. On the walls, rodeo posters hung alongside intricate Navajo sand paintings and flea market prints of R.C. Gorman’s Navajo women.

On the weekends I would travel 100 miles to visit my grandparents, who lived in a traditional Navajo hogan as they always had, observing the mores of their ancestors, without electricity or running water. On walks, my grandmother taught me the bounty of the desert. Juniper berries for medicine. Yucca roots for natural soap. Greenthread herb for Navajo tea. Once, when a horned toad climbed on my foot and startled me, my grandmother told me not to harm it. Horned toads, she told me, are grandfathers of the arrowheads: if you kill them you will get sick and someone close may die.

After that, I watched and followed the toads whenever I could, fascinated by their morbid power. I was drawn to their strong and clear purpose when I myself felt so powerless, and—as the years passed—purposeless.

As a very young child, it didn’t occur to me to question my family’s bi-cultural way of my life. But that changed when I was six. My mother and I were in our local border town of Farmington, New Mexico, and I had to go to the bathroom. As we walked past the town’s white restaurant, I saw a bathroom sign through the window, so I ran in. Almost immediately I felt a firm grip on my arm. I looked up and there was a woman—white, frowning—asking me sharply where I was going and then yelling at my mother, asking what the hell she was doing and ordering her to leave with her dirty child.

The memory is a blur of voices, but I remember the pain in my arm and the embarrassment as I stood there while the grown-ups argued, the urgency of my physical need ever more pressing, until I peed my pants.

I came to expect the slights and insults, though I never got used to them. Years later, as a teenager, I remember driving home with two friends after a movie when two trucks full of white dudes suddenly appeared. They followed us to the rez border and then turned around. We felt hunted on our own land.

When I was 15, I was assaulted, and, in a separate incident, my best friend was brutally murdered. Two other friends were killed in alcohol-fueled incidents—one was walking around drunk and was struck by a car, the other was hit by a drunk driver. These horrors left me in deep despair. I numbed myself with alcohol, and I attempted suicide.

The year I graduated high school, I was working at the local KFC and living in the family apartment. But I had recovered just enough from my earlier traumas to know that I had to leave.

Early mornings in the apartment were peaceful. Before my niece woke up and Sesame Street blared from the television, I would help my mother make breakfast, the aroma of desert sage wafting in through the windows, blending with the tang of coffee and spam potatoes.

One morning, while we waited for the biscuit dough to rise, I told my mother of my plans.

“Oh, Shi’awéé’—my baby—why do you want to leave?” she asked.

In that moment, I wavered. What would I be leaving behind? The red, dusty earth and scorching heat of my ancestors. The fresh pine trees, sweet sage, and smoky creosote bushes that brought reassurance, exhilaration. My birthright.

“If I don’t leave,” I told her, “I’ll go crazy.”

“Your grandfather told me when you were a child that you had an adventurous spirit,” she told me. “He said that you were a storyteller, and that you would leave.”

Leaving was the beginning, but eventually I came to understand that it wasn’t enough. I needed to go back to school. This may seem obvious, but to me it wasn’t. Higher education was never a value instilled in me—my parents only told me to find a job and not depend on others.

In college I made the most important realization of my life: The problem with the depiction of Indians in media—the romanticized portraits and Disney-fied portrayals—is the lack of understanding of our history as actual people, Indian people. Through studying other tribal communities, I rediscovered who I was as a Navajo woman, and, with that, my purpose in life: I would become a storyteller as my grandfather foresaw. My mission: to portray the realities and complexities of native communities.

Today my multimedia work explores the lives of real American Indians, not ethnographic ephemera. While traditions are constantly changing, I understand the strong ties I have with my culture and understand why we must maintain them as Diné people. I am grateful to be able to transform my experience into art.

The post It Wasn’t Until I Left the Reservation That I Understood My Purpose as a Navajo Storyteller appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Cruz is an octogenarian who, in his heyday (the ’70s to the ’90s), was a leader among Chicano muralists. He was also the most Mexican in terms of his choice of subject matter. He lovingly depicts an essential world, ignoring the overwhelming presence of America del Norte. His vision is fixed on the monuments of Pre-Columbian times, the conquest, and the Virgin of Guadalupe, ending with the wars and revolutions that took place a century ago.

In 1981, he painted an enormous, idiosyncratic mural about the Spanish conquest on the wall of Moctezuma Cafe, across the street from Evergreen Cemetery in Boyle Heights. It is not clear where he found the imagery he drew from, but he planted symbols to show the conquistadores as destructive. For example, he included a figure of death speeding toward America on a surfboard as the Spanish soldiers land ashore, a playful touch. In a scene of encounter between the invading Spaniards and native women, an invader holds a hissing snake. Women are shown as submissive, making offerings.

Cruz paints such moments in Mexican history as the carving of the Mayan calendar; the Alamo besieged by tiny, insect-like people; and an elderly Father Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla starting the revolution of 1810, with an enormous revolver in one hand and a painting of the Virgin of Guadalupe in the other.

In his narratives, the figures have distinct looks and are fully engaged in fighting, conversing, or listening. Couples look at each other with tenderness. In his Last Supper, the apostles are varied in appearance and gestures. In his storefront murals, people wear fashions as timeless as the brown dirt under their feet. Absent from his art are zoot suiters with their classic cars, low riders, farm workers, gang members, mariachis, or local sports teams. The only reminder of modern California I found in his murals is the crouching skeleton surfing the waves following the conquistadores.

I have many questions for Cruz, whom I’ve never met. Such as: What drives you to paint traditional Mexico? Why do you ignore present times?

Once I went looking for him at his favorite bar, but he was not there. I was told that he slept in his troca, parked on the street. On another occasion two years ago—while looking for him at La Princesita Meat Market on Cesar Chavez Avenue, where he had painted a mural—I learned that he had moved to Calexico.

It is a shame that time and vandals are erasing his work. The image of death riding the surfboard has disappeared. And so Manuel G. Cruz remains largely unknown and uncollected. I like his reddish brown California hills, his sense of movement, his passion to record his vision of history and his playfulness as seen in the women’s hats, death on the surfboard, and the arrangement of meats in Princesita Market. The spirit of his images, and the effort that went into them, should not disappear.

The post The Greatest Muralist You’ve Never Heard Of appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Corporate advertisers treat it as the de facto Mexican Day, if not Latino Day, in this country. In 1998, the United States Post Office issued a Cinco de Mayo stamp featuring two folklórico dancers. In 2005, Congress passed a resolution making Cinco de Mayo an official national holiday to celebrate Mexican-American heritage. And it’s customary for presidents to celebrate Cinco de Mayo on the White House lawn with margaritas flowing, mariachi music playing, and dancers in brightly colored traditional costumes.

Don’t they all know that Mexican Independence Day is actually September 16?

Growing up in rural Zacatecas, Mexico, in the early 1970s, holidays and festivities were big community-building affairs. I attended fiestas with tamborazo-style band music, rodeos with churros showing off their roping and riding skills, and the religious procession honoring the town’s patron saint. What I remember most, though, was El Grito, the traditional cry of “Viva Mexico!” to commemorate Mexico’s independence from Spain on September 16. Like Christmas, the holiday is celebrated on the eve of the big day, and the day itself. But I have no memory of Cinco de Mayo, at least not before migrating to the United States.

It was in my elementary school’s bilingual education classroom in Ventura, California, that I first learned about the holiday, which had been incorporated into lesson plans and school assemblies on cultural diversity. In high schools at the time, Mexican-American students began organizing their own Cinco de Mayo celebrations to show off their cultural pride and make a public claim of belonging.

But what does Cinco de Mayo commemorate originally? It is indeed a holiday in Mexico, to be clear, but a lesser holiday not associated with any particular form of revelry. It is the anniversary of the famous battle of Puebla, in which Mexican liberal forces defeated an occupying French army and its Mexican conservative allies during one of Mexico’s serial 19th-century civil wars. By helping to impose an unemployed Hapsburg prince as Mexican emperor, the French were hoping to gain a new beachhead in the Americas while the U.S. was distracted with its own epic civil war.

There are a number of competing (but not mutually exclusive) theories as to why this, of all Mexican holidays, was the one to stand out on this side of the border, in the face of ostensibly stronger contenders. One theory is that it would have been awkward for Mexicans in the U.S. to be too eager to celebrate the official independence day of another country. The generations of Mexican immigrants who came to America weren’t necessarily on best terms with the authoritarian Mexican governments of yesteryear, and weren’t keen to celebrate as if they were those governments’ blind followers. Better to select a different one: Cinco de Mayo.

There is an additional, more prosaic, explanation for Cinco de Mayo’s stature on this side of the border—and that is the fact that it is a more convenient time for migrant farmworkers to celebrate, as was driven home to me when I did doctoral research on the holiday’s popularity—going strong since 1923—in Corona, California.

The Southern California town once known as the “Lemon Capital of the World” was one of the earliest to celebrate Cinco de Mayo in the U.S. Mexican workers made up the majority of the labor force working in the 2,000 acres of lemon groves, 11 packinghouses, and lemon processing plant in 1930s Corona. Lemons were grown in winter months but harvested in springtime, just in time for Cinco de Mayo. The timing of the lemon harvest made Cinco de Mayo a well timed holiday, when people would welcome a reason to rest and celebrate and have a little more disposable income than usual, not to mention ideal weather. When May 5 fell on a weekday, employers paid workers early, and students were dismissed from class early to attend the festivities. As early as 1939, the Los Angeles Times reported, “All work in the citrus industry was suspended for the Cinco de Mayo holiday and several thousand persons came to participate in the celebration.”

Corona is typical of other agricultural communities in California that rely on Mexican farm labor during harvest time, where Cinco de Mayo became an entrenched holiday both because of what it represented and when it fell on the calendar. For example, La Habra’s Spring Citrus Fair incorporates a full day of Cinco de Mayo activities, and thousands attend the Fallbrook Avocado festival during harvest season to sample delicious guacamole and attend Cinco de Mayo festivities.

Corona’s Cinco de Mayo celebration—which continues to this day—has long sought to keep its events local, intimate, and inclusive. The morning parade still features local heroes and role models as grand marshals—for instance, the mother of a World War II hero killed in action or a Latina superior court judge—rather than outside celebrities. The town limits sponsors to local businesses and nonprofit organizations, continuing the spirit of the late 1940s, when the holiday was used to raise money to finance the first youth community center that later became the Corona Boys and Girls Club, which provided recreation programs for kids and teenagers. Proceeds from the celebration provide college scholarships to local Latino high school students. The crowning of the Cinco de Mayo Queen is not simply a beauty contest, but a way to encourage young Latinas to gain public speaking skills, gain confidence, and take on a leadership role in their communities. When organizers had trouble raising funds during the recent recession, the city stepped in to make it an official civic event—fully incorporating the Mexican holiday into American public life.

There is no beer or alcohol sponsorship of Corona’s Cinco de Mayo, even though you can’t talk about the popularity of the holiday everywhere else without talking about the other Corona. The corporate marketplace started pushing Cinco de Mayo as a day-long happy hour when we’re all supposed to down cervezas and margaritas when it recognized the demographic growth of the Latino population in the 1980s. Corporations thought that advertising, sponsorship, and promotion of Cinco de Mayo events would enable them to tap into that young consumer market. Beer and alcohol companies led the charge by spending millions on marketing the holiday. Corona Extra (the beer—no relation to the town) alone spent $91 million in 2013, according to Kantar Media, advertising around the holiday in both Spanish and English, calling itself “the original party beer of Cinco de Mayo.”

I don’t think that means there were kegs on the battlefield in Puebla, but it’s an amusing image. So go have a drink on Cinco de Mayo. But when you do, take a moment to reflect on the evolution of this holiday that commemorates the Americanization of a Mexican diaspora eager to assert its own identity—and, increasingly, the Mexicanization of mainstream U.S. culture as well. ¡Salud!

The post When Life Hands You Lemons, Make Cinco de Mayo appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Marilou grew up poor in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, about two and a half hours away from Johnson City, where the university is located. A Sunday baked ham, she recalls, was a rare luxury. Instead, her mother would score a Spam loaf in a pretty crosshatch pattern, coat it with a brown sugar sauce, and top the Hormel product with a row of maraschino cherries.

The upper-level and graduate students in my class are usually surprised when we start the class with Spam, but what Marilou says reverberates through the course. Her story illustrates a pervasive theme in this hardscrabble part of America: making do with what you have, and celebrating it.

Native Americans here knew this from the start, growing corn, beans, and squash—the “three sisters”—together because of their symbiotic relationship. Corn removes nitrogen from the soil, and beans replace it. Cornstalks provide a natural trellis for the bean plants to climb on. Low-growing squash plants create shade and hold in moisture.

Appalachian food has been sustainable and organic for generations. We’ve been offering “farm to table” fare forever, without ever having to say so. Sit down to many farmhouse tables in the summertime and you might conclude that the family has embraced a vegetarian diet. Sliced tomatoes still warm from the sun, corn on the cob boiled and then bathed in butter, cucumber slices bobbing in ice water, and a “mess” of green beans constitute a common meal in my part of America.

One of Appalachia’s most iconic dishes, soup beans and cornbread, is a belly-filling, soul-enriching inheritance from Native Americans. These are largely home-cooked dishes, but in Johnson City, soup beans and cornbread have even made it to the drive-through at the Buc Deli.

And in my hometown of Greeneville, about 30 minutes from Johnson City, Romie and Zella Mae Britt paired soup beans up with another dish that has simmered on Appalachian stoves for generations: beef stew. The result, introduced in the 1950s at the Britt family’s grill, is still served today at the restaurant’s unpretentious descendant, Bean Barn. It’s called “Beans All the Way,” topped off with a scattering of chopped onions.

A serving of soup beans and cornbread is a fitting culinary emblem for the Appalachian region not only for its profound simplicity, frugality, and heartiness—but also for its history. Flavoring the pot of pinto beans simmering on the Bean Barn stove is lard, the rendered fat of the pig, an animal brought to the lower South by the Spanish in the 16th century and to the upper South by the English in the 17th. In the soup bean bowl, then, the native and the imported blend in culinary harmony.

The ramp is another Appalachian treasure revered by the Cherokees, who have foraged for this wild mountain leek in the springtime for generations. Because of their pungent taste, ramps were eaten in order to get the blood flowing again and to “thin” the blood after a winter of inactivity. Festivals throughout the Appalachian Mountains pay tribute to ramps, and white-tablecloth chefs nationwide pay top dollar to acquire them in the spring.

A “mess” of ramps, wild mountain leeks, Unicoi County, Tennessee.

Indeed, the subsistence fare of Appalachia has now become chic. With today’s emphasis on organically grown, humanely raised food that travels only a short distance from the farm to the table, chefs are rediscovering the timeless wisdom of the Appalachian worldview. Done in the right spirit of honesty and respect, embellishment of mountain foodstuffs by celebrity chefs is overdue recognition that the cuisine of Appalachia matters.

The flip side is the belief that if a recipe comes from Appalachia, then it must need improvement. That attitude is changing, but we have encountered it among some cookbook authors and magazine editors, who insist on changing my wife Jill’s grandmother’s dried apple stack cake recipe, despite the fact that it has satisfied diners in the mountains of southwest Virginia for about 120 years and is the recipe most requested by family and friends.

Editors at a well-known magazine published in the South, as well as the author of a hefty cookbook on American cuisine, refused to accept the fact that this traditional mountain recipe requires no spicing whatsoever—not even any vanilla extract. Its ingredients are simple, straightforward, and right from the farm: eggs, buttermilk, sorghum syrup, and dried apples, with a trip to the local market only for some flour. Its creation does require long labor and the patience to wait three days for it to cure before it is served. Even though author Joseph Dabney calls dried apple stack cake “the most mountain of desserts,” the labor and time involved in its making are likely the reasons this cake is rarely ever found in restaurants.

Jill Sauceman with her traditional dried apple stack cake. She inherited the recipe from her grandmother, Nevada Parker Derting, who lived in Scott County, Virginia. The watercolor painting of the stack cake on the wall was done by Nancy Jane Earnest.

Only recently has the cake gotten some respect for what it is. Cookbook author Nathalie Dupree chose to include the original, spiceless recipe in her 2013 book Mastering the Art of Southern Cooking. And we often wonder what Jill’s grandmother would think if she saw the story about her simple mountain cake in an august volume like the forthcoming Oxford Companion to Sweets.

Through readings, essays, discussion, and of course eating our way across the Appalachian table in our foodways class, we learn this about how we nourish ourselves: The most precious ingredient in Appalachian cookery is time. Time to plant and nurture seeds of corn and beans. Time to cultivate fields of cane through spring, summer, and fall, and boil down the juice over a hot fire in October to produce the precious thick sweetness of sorghum syrup. Time to cure a pig and wait more than a year for the reward of country ham. Time to learn from a grandmother and perpetuate her traditions.

The post What Exactly Is Appalachian Cuisine? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.