A Lifestyle Built on the Chile

Few people here need a calendar to follow seasonal changes. Nature alerts them in a singularly New Mexican way: The green chile harvest signals the end of summer, and the red chile harvest signals the beginning of autumn.

The harvest is a harbinger of family gatherings and chile-centric rituals. It also fires New Mexico’s agricultural engine, employing 15,000 laborers a day at its peak.

With an annual crop valued at $150 million, the state is the nation’s largest producer of chile peppers. And now New Mexico’s chiles are reaching a wider audience: Salsa recently surpassed ketchup as the nation’s leading condiment.

Festivals and cooking contests commonly pay homage to the chile, especially at this time of year. Last month’s state fair featured five chile cooking contests, culminating with the much-anticipated Battle of the Salsas.

“They are the sights and aromas of fall in New Mexico--driving down the street with red chiles hanging everywhere and the smell of roasting green chiles in the air,” said SuAnne Armstrong, owner of The Chile Shop, a local institution.

Santa Fe designates the second week in September as Really Chile week to celebrate the state’s favorite fruit. Among the events was a “poetry slam,” during which teenagers rapped using words relating to chiles. The festival’s highlight was the performance by the Santa Fe Girls Club of the play, “The New Mexico Chile.”

The bulk of the state’s peppers are grown in the dusty Hatch Valley in the far south near the Mexican border. The town of Hatch proudly proclaims itself the “Chile Capital of the World.” There, a long growing season creates a hotter chile. Plants grown during northern New Mexico’s shorter season are characterized by their milder flavor.

Most of the green chiles are rushed to wholesalers and then to restaurants in the region and around the country. The rest are frozen or canned.

Red chiles are dried and the whole pods are used for seasonings or fashioned into a dizzying array of tourist objects. Ground red chile also is processed into a variety of spices and can be used as a coloring for food and cosmetics.

Stashing a Few for Friends and Family

Chile lovers often show up on farms with burlap sacks to pick their own. Wholesale demand for the peppers is so great that most farms’ entire harvest is spoken for. Some growers set aside small amounts to sell to longtime local customers or to old friends.

“It’s my favorite time of the year,” said Nick Carson, who runs the family owned Kit Carson Farms in Rincon. “Right now my wife and my youngest son are over at the dehydrating plant. My oldest son is out in the field bringing chile to her and my middle son is delivering” to buyers.

Carson said he has fond memories of his youth on the farm, when the bright peppers left on the hillsides to dry created a red blaze across the dun-colored landscape.

Most fields are still handpicked. The harvest brings an influx of field workers streaming north from Mexico. Carson said his family has traditionally worked alongside multiple generations of Mexican pickers, laboring to get the crop in before the first frost.

That tradition is changing, however, as many of those workers now stay in Mexico, which has taken over 70% of New Mexico’s production of jalapeno peppers. The loss was a blow, but jalapenos represent only a small portion of the state’s chile crop.

Since the North American Free Trade Agreement, there has been a sixfold increase in chile imports from Mexico, according to Rich Phillips, a horticulturist and coordinator of the New Mexico Chile Task Force.

The task force was formed to develop ways to maintain the health of the chile pepper industry, which is threatened not only by weather, disease and insects, but also by increasing global competition.

“Chiles are part of our culture, sure,” Phillips said, “but the industry is crucial to the state’s economy. To the growers, chiles are an important component in crop rotation.”

In the state’s less rural areas, people are fixated on obtaining the harvested chiles. So sought-after are the just-picked peppers that car dealers have been known to offer a choice of red or green chiles as an incentive with a new car purchase. Indeed, in 1998, the state Legislature adopted “Red or green?” as the official state question.

For many New Mexicans, harvest time offers families and neighbors an excuse to get together. Terry Jennings, who lives outside of Santa Fe, said he and his neighbors buy a 40-pound bag of roasted green chiles, then have a party to prepare the peppers for freezing.

“It’s a neighborhood tradition,” he said. “We peel them, then de-seed them, then put them into freezer [bags]. It’s an excuse to have a fiesta. Everyone takes a share and it just about gets us through winter.”

An Addiction of Sorts

Jerry Hawkes, an agricultural economist who travels the state, loads fresh green chiles into the back of a pickup to deliver to friends.

“For some people, there is an addictive quality to chiles. They eat them for breakfast, lunch and dinner,” he said.

And not just in New Mexico. Armstrong said her shop has shipped chiles to just about every spot on the map.

“People get passionate about chiles and they have to have them,” she said. “We send chile products all over the world. We’ve sent boxes of chiles to the Antarctic. Some lucky person had a warmer night.”