Profitable Ritual : Bread Staff of Life, Stuff of Economy for Indian Pueblo

As muffled voices echo through the dusty dirt streets of this adobe village, the crisp, daybreak air is alive with the delightful aroma of baking bread.

A centuries-old ritual is taking place in this tiny Indian pueblo--known as the village of the kleo-ron-tie ba-who-pan (women who bake bread) in the Isleta Indians’ native Tiwa tongue.

By time-honored tradition, nearly every household in New Mexico’s 19 Pueblo Indian villages has a mud orno-- a beehive-shaped oven that is used to produce the family’s bread and occasional loaves for sale. But nowhere is bread produced and sold on the scale it is in Isleta.

For the village of Isleta, population 3,000, bread is the mainstay of the local economy.

Turning a Tidy Profit

Every day, at least 50 backyard ornos-- and as many as 200 on weekends and holidays--fire up. The women sell their fresh bread door to door in Belen, Bosque, Los Lunas and Albuquerque. They sell their wares by the roadside, from the kitchens of their adobe houses and from stands in the village plaza in the shadows of the 364-year-old Mission San Agustin de Isleta.

The bread makers can turn a tidy profit. Each usually bakes one or two batches of 25 loaves each. The loaves then sell for $1.25 to as high as $2.

“I clear 75 cents to 85 cents on each loaf of bread I sell at $1.25. There’s good profit in bread,” says Jeanette Abeita, 32. “These Isleta ladies are stashing away $30 to $50 added income a day from the sale of bread to augment the family budget.”

The bread makers start a fire of cottonwood branches about 6 a.m. on the oven’s lava-rock floor. After the fire burns for about an hour the coals are swept out.

Then the tins containing the loaves of bread are placed inside the oven with a long paddle. In less than a hour the bread is done. The steamy, hot bread is retrieved with the paddle and placed in a wicker basket.

Each loaf of bread has a different design. “We learn the secrets of making bread as little girls from our mothers, grandmothers and aunts,” Abeita explains. “It is an honor to be a bread maker. Each person has a different way, a slightly different touch.”