Resurrecting the Old Family Farmstead
Story and photos by A lejandro López
It seemed that with the passing of my mother in 2003 , our family farm too would meet its end without the possibility of being revived . At the time , there seemed to be no one in our large family who wanted to live here in spite of the many tender memories that we harbored around this most beloved of places where we had grown up . At the heart of our quandary was that we had all dispersed to the four corners of the urbanized world as was the trend in the late twentieth century .
My ten siblings and I especially relished telling stories of our once slow , bucolic lives on this small but very real paradise where we lacked nothing too substantial while reveling in a nurturing family and community , good food , adventure of every sort , and back then , a mainly coherent and rather optimistic worldview .
We marveled at how we had lived in step with each of the annual seasonal changes that took place during our growing-up years , and the kinds of robust , survival-based responses that these had elicited from us . We also marveled at how our current adult lives were now regulated by the clock , the appointment book and the ubiquitous ringing of the telephone rather than by nature ’ s cycles . Having lived through an era of momentous change , we also noted how we had now come to be dependent on store-bought , packaged foods instead of relying directly on the land and our own labors for eggs , meat , milk , butter , cheese , fruits and vegetables , as we had formerly been .
Except for the last years during which all of our family ’ s care was directed at my mother ’ s wellbeing , the land had been properly cared for and planted in a
Rocío Alcantar has a vision for the land .
variety of crops since 1944 and quite possibly , long before then by other families . After all , our village of Santa Cruz was established by Spanish-Mexican people who had migrated from central and southern Mexico into what is now the northern part of the U . S . State of New Mexico by 1736 , albeit much to the detriment of the native peoples who had lived here since time immemorial . My family and I are the descendants of , in the words of celebrated Mexican poet Octavio Paz , “ The Aztec-striped Spanish people ” who made their way to the American Southwest , formerly northern Mexico , on horseback and on foot , as well as of the native peoples of this region with whom they intermarried or otherwise mixed . For hundreds of years , we practiced smallscale , labor-intensive irrigation farming together with sheep and goat herding . Our chief staples were corn , wheat , chile , squash and , of course , beans . Once a year , the men would go off on a buffalo , deer or elk hunt into the distant plains and forested mountains . These expeditions usually netted large quantities of meat which helped tide the people over the cold winter months .
In one of North America ’ s most arid climates and rugged landscapes , generations of my people managed to squeeze out an existence that , however materially
14 plenty I autumn harvest 2022