from the ground up
Preserving the Memory and Practice of Farming Traditions through Mural Painting
Story and photos by Alejandro López
For hundreds of years, and certainly during my youth, my home valley of Santa Cruz-Española in northern New Mexico, which is nourished by several tributaries and irrigated by a network of acequias or earthen canals, was the acknowledged breadbasket of northern New Mexico. People here were famous for their wheat and, of course, their bread. Equally prized were their squash, beans, peas, chilies, melons, apples, apricots, peaches and plums. Entire families— not just the men— were engaged in the growing of crops which was supplemented with meat, animal fat, milk, butter and cheese through breeding and caring for their farm animals.
People produced almost everything they needed and lived quite contented lives, punctuated by meaningful social and religious rituals that marked the passage from birth to death in an orderly fashion. Visitors to our communities commented that they had scarcely come across a people who did so much singing or had so many songs, figuring we must be quite a happy bunch for that to be the case.
To be sure, as children growing up on our family farm, daily life possessed an unsurpassed sense of interest and drama; overnight, a cow might give birth to an adorable-looking calf, an event which sparked lots of excitement, but also no end to questions about the biological functions of mammals. Or consider how in early May we could wander into an utterly fantastic, dreamlike reality when a hundred of my father’ s apple trees exploded with millions if not billions of sweetly-scented blossoms. We were definitely left spellbound
18 plenty I autumn harvest 2025