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“Celebrating Artisanal Foodways at the Window Rock Flea Market”

6/28/2021

Photo by Turkey Boy Photography

After more than two years away, on Friday, I was finally able to return to one of my favorite spots on Navajo Nation, the Window Rock Flea Market. Parking my truck in the dusty parking lot, I beelined to the food stands with my dog, Nira, I decided on the Grilled Food Café, where I ordered my favorite Diné (Navajo) dish of all time, “steam corn mutton stew,” also known as neeshjízhii. At the risk of unduly singling out any one vendor—all the vendors I have eaten at, there, and across Navajo Nation, also make delicious neeshjízhii, squash stew, and breakfast burritos with thick, homemade tortillas—I wanted to do a shoutout to this food stand in particular because they have just opened back up after the pandemic and because the proprietors are so explicit and intentional about the local value and craft of the food they make and sell.

Neeshjízhii is a Diné specialty food, and it is incredibly labor intensive to make. The corn, also called neeshjízhii, is smoky and complex, and has a slight hint of caramel after you bite into it (it’s similar to “chicos” in a New Mexican context). Making it takes several days, including harvesting the ears, steaming them on the cob in an earthen pit on cedar wood coals, shucking and drying the ears, and then removing the kernels from the cobs (southwest farmfresh.org). The corn is served in a simple broth with large chunks of mutton (dibé bitsį’ or sheep meat) on the bone, with salt as the only additional seasoning. It’s a deceptively simple meal, but don’t be fooled: paired with the grease and crunch of the frybread that comes on the side, it’s one of the most satisfying meals I’ve ever eaten (my friend refers to this stew as “Diné chapstick,” because it makes your lips greasy and shiny).

The sign in the window of the Grilled Food Café reads:

“When you buy from a small mom & pop business, you are not helping a CEO buy a third vacation home. You are helping a little girl get dance lessons, a little boy get his team jersey, a mom put food on the table, a dad pay a mortgage, or a student pay for college. Our customers are our shareholders, and they are the ones we strive to make happy. Thank you for supporting small businesses!”

After I finished my meal, I wandered around to the other vendors, leaving with a couple small gifts for friends and some new (to me) Diné gospel CDs from a vendor who loves Diné gospel and country western bands. I chatted with George, a dapper 81 year old who bikes into “town” each day to check his mail and who worked for many years harvesting sugar beets on a farm in Idaho, before moving back home. I gassed up at Navajo Petroleum, bought a Navajo Times (the weekly paper for the Navajo Nation, out on Thursdays) with the front page featuring a performer from the most recent Navajo Pride parade, and headed back to Albuquerque, hands smelling faintly of mutton, accompanied by the songs of gospel singer Larry Kaibetoney on the stereo.

A bowl of neeshjízhii with frybread or tortilla (your choice) will set you back between $11.00-$12.00, or about ½ the price of a high end entrée at your favorite restaurant. But the richness of the flavor, the sensory experience and the stories that come with it are priceless. Wherever you are, please consider supporting unique, local and artisanal food trucks and foodways.

NB: If you make the trip, please know that masking and social distancing are still fully in effect, per Navajo Tribal Law, on the Navajo Nation. Most food stands, and other flea market vendors, prefer cash, only.

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South Valley as Sanctuary not Security Risk

6/19/2021

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I recently hosted an Air Bnb guest, Girish, from southern India, an engineer and environmentalist based in Boston. An avid cyclist who is biking as I write from Taos back to Albuquerque, Girish told me about a biking trip he had initially planned with a friend, biking from northern to southern New Mexico and tracing the historic Camino Real that links New Mexico to Mexico. His friend, from Santa Fé, was game until he learned they’d need to bike through Albuquerque’s South Valley. “What if we break down or get a flat tire in the South Valley?” his friend asked, querying if they could re-route along treacherous I-25, instead. I laughed when I heard this story. Since I moved to Albuquerque from the Navajo Nation, it’s a familiar refrain, with the South Valley framed as dangerous, unsafe, a sort of Burqueño wasteland. But the question also got me thinking about how we define “safety,” who gets to make that call, and how relative to other things this idea is to begin with.

I have lived in the South Valley now for seven years. It’s where I bought my first home, and it’s where, for the first time in my life, I have put down real roots. My house is an adobe casita on old Spanish land grant land, part of a subdivision that was sold off to different landowners in the 1930s. They are large lots, filled with giant cottonwood trees, alfalfa fields, donkeys, peacocks, chickens, and the incredible irrigation system that creates the acéquias or ditches, providing endless walking and horseback trails and lovingly maintained by the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District.

But, in my travels around the globe, my neighborhood in the South Valley is also one of the most diverse, inter-generational and family-centered places I have ever lived. So, if I broke down on a bike, it’s exactly where I’d want to be. Across the street from me is three generations of a Buddhist family from Cambodia who lovingly water their roses from their irrigation pump each morning and have prayer flags draped across their backyard. Adjacent to them is a large, multigenerational family from Chihuahua, Mexico; they relish live music, their dogs, and large family gatherings to celebrate rites of passage. Next to them is an aspiring vintner, who single handedly cleared an entire field with a pickaxe and has cultivated a beautiful vineyard with access to irrigation water from the Hubbell Acequia. To my left is Jim, an auto-detailer and Vietnam vet who lives in the Heights but spends his days in the Valley restoring vintage vehicles from his garage, And across my back fence is Maryann, whose Spanish family has been in New Mexico, and in the South Valley, for generations and probably longer than when my Danish ancestors first arrived in the U.S.

Two doors up, behind a high adobe wall two retired lawyers specializing in Indian Law and working for the Bureau of Indian Affairs. They are music lovers and one is a citizen of the Choctaw Nation. Around the corner from them is Jaime, a mechanic from Mexico City who works on both my truck and my scooter, has an immaculate yard, and loves listening to Alan Jackson songs while he works. On the corner is a large Diné family who have recreated a small, rez-style sheep camp in their yard, replete with gardens, livestock, and a rodeo roping dummy. They offer cement-mixing services and sometimes have Navajo Taco sales on their front lawn. Two houses up from them is Dave, a retired Christian missionary, married to a woman he met on mission while in Scotland; they have a herd of sheep, chickens, and a sheepdog, as do the neighbors two doors down the lane from them that snakes behind the elementary school. This man, it turns out, is also married to a Scotswoman in and who is, completely coincidentally, from the same village as Dave’s wife. And across from Dave is Lourdes and her family, in a large home with ornate metalwork on the fence and multicolored rose beds circling the entire yard. Lourdes runs a daycare facility out of her home, and her oldest daughter just graduated from the police academy and is about to join the Albuquerque Police Department. And further down the road is my dear friend, music teacher, fiddle player and my bandmate, Dair, who lives in an extended family compound in her beautiful straw bale house. So the houses, and the lives they represent, are a patchwork of an incredible diversity of life experiences, some of it pretty and some of it less pretty, but all of it very real. In these dwelling places, we also see varying access to credit, and to intergenerational wealth (or lack thereof), literally displayed in the shape, size, color and materials of the built environment.

Certainly, the South Valley is structurally disadvantaged—it’s the site of many of the city’s landfills, junkyards, and polluting industrial zones and factories—but so, too, is Albuquerque on the whole when compared to other cities in the region. And what doesn’t get said is it’s a place of enormous heart, resilience, generosity and “family values,” defined in its broadest and most wholistic sense. As my neighbor Kitty recently noted, everywhere in Albuquerque there are security issues, because there are structural inequalities across our city. It’s not just a South Valley issue.

So I told Girish that if he broke down on his bike in the South Valley, it’s probably one of the only places in Albuquerque where someone would actually pull over on the side of the road, fix his flat, and offer to get him a meal in the meantime. I don’t see the South Valley—whether you’re living in it or just passing by—as a security risk. I see it as a sanctuary in a city of, for me, seemingly identical intersections and anonymous faces. So, the next time you come down or descend from the Heights, try the amazing chile relleno torta at El Paisa or their aguas frescas with fresh chunks of fruit (if you’re lucky you might see some folks arrive on horseback), walk our beautiful acequias, lounge along the Rio Grande, and visit the Gutiérrez-Hubbell House to learn more about El Camino Real, and know that you are warmly welcome.

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Cultural Anthropologist, Singer-Songwriter and multilingual speaker Kristina Jacobsen blogs on the boundaries and connections between songwriting, ethnography and the songwriting life.

“Celebrating Artisanal Foodways at the Window Rock Flea Market”

South Valley as Sanctuary not Security Risk

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