During the Depression in Arivaca
November 1, 2008
We are facing the Panic of 2008: an economic downturn, recession, maybe depression. Over the years there have been many of these, but the Great Depression sticks in one’s mind. The Crash of 1929, when on Black Thursday, October 24, a wave of selling began in which the stock market collapsed. Soon after, the worst of that was over, but the economic downturn which became the Great Depression lasted for years, and wasn’t really over until World War II brought about increased military spending. My parents remembered the Depression vividly. My mother, like many people in the 1920s, lost money when her bank failed, and she really didn’t have anything to lose—it was all she had been able to save while working in a menial job. She never forgot this as long as she lived. My father remembered sacks of “splits” or broken pinto beans, which sold for less than whole beans. Tony Prevor said that his family was already being careful with their money and it didn’t affect them as much as other people. Chicago was a big city, though, and you could buy day-old bread for pennies and milk for 7 cents a quart. People made do with the basics. But then, their expectations were different from ours.
Some time ago I asked the late Armando Membrila to talk about what it was like living in Arivaca during the Depression, how they survived and what they ate. This is what he remembered:
“We survived on water cress during the Depression. There was beautiful big water cress and there were no fences. You could go any where. We used to haul that stuff in by the bucket load. I think my mother (Jesus Quintero Membrila, also known as Doña Chu) invented what is known as water cress stew. To this day, I love it. She would take a soup bone and throw it in a pot and cook it for a while. If you had a little bit of meat, cut it up like stew and throw it in there. And then she would take potatoes and cut them up and throw them in, put an onion in there and season it, salt it and just about ten minutes before it’s ready to eat you throw the water cress in. If you cook it too long it just dissolves. And it’s a very tasty stew and we lived on that day in and day out during the Depression. Potatoes were a penny a pound. And the soup bone, you got it for free because all you did was go to the store and ask for it. They didn’t sell it. In those days there was no such thing as T-bone steaks or sirloins. You went and got a piece of meat. They would just throw the bones out. Or they’d give you the bone. That’s how we survived.
“My mom always raised beans and those big Mexican pumpkins. My mom would take the pumpkins when they were ripe and hack away with a knife until she got all the peeling off and then she would cut them in half and cut all the insides out. She would take the seeds and dry them. And then she would take this pumpkin and start cutting a long strip until she would cut that entire half of a pumpkin into a long strip and she’d hang it up to dry and she’d call it bichicoles. It was dehydrated pumpkin. In the winter time she would take the pumpkin and put it in water and it was just like pumpkin. I’ve never seen that done since. I remember later they came out with dehydrated eggs and potatoes and stuff and I thought my mom used to do this without anybody knowing it. You jerked the meat– that was dehydrated. There was an apple orchard down by the river going west toward the Piñeda house which was about a mile from the town itself. We used to take the apples and cut them in slices and put them to dry. They were just like what you buy in the store as dried apples. There were several old orchards. There were several old Spanish ranches especially down towards Las Jarillas and every one of them had their own orchard. If you came upon a tree that had fruit on it you picked the fruit. It was just there. Nobody ever said anything about it, as long as you didn’t do any damage you were welcome to eat. My mom would dehydrate anything that she could to preserve it. There were no ice boxes, no electricity, nothing like that. We always had bellotas (acorns) and sometimes black walnuts. You would go up in the hills to get them.
“There was yerba del manzo, we used to dig it up in the meadow. It’s an herb. I believe the leaf is a wide green leaf and it just grew above the ground, with little white flowers. They used the root for some kind of medicine. Yerba del Indio grew out there too. That was a real bitter root. I wouldn’t recognize it today. We dug it up down below the Hubbell house: there was a meadow there. There was what we called pamita (mustard). You could get that anywhere along the sides of the road. It had a kind of reddish seed, real tiny. You could go like this and shake it off into a bucket. We used to fill jars of it and use it to make a refresco. When you took your bath my mom used to have a glass of water with pamita and sugar in it and you would drink it and it was supposed to refresh your stomach. There was Mormon tea up in the hills there. My mom used to make teswin with apples or whatever fruit she could get. If she could get a pineapple that’s the best way to make it. During the Depression we ate lambs quarters, what they call chuales. I planted some in my back yard because I love it and they grow every year. We used to eat a little plant that grew along the river’s edge that we called chinitas. They don’t grow up–they grow out and have jaggedy edges. You eat the leaves like lettuce but it doesn’t form a head. It was called chinitas because the leaves were crinkly. And of course berros, water cress. We ate vasómaris, that was a great big leaf that grew in the water just along the river’s edge. “We had chickens by the dozens but my dad wouldn’t let us eat the eggs because he wanted to keep hatching more chickens. But when the Depression got real bad my mom would take and kill two chickens and put them in the oven with nothing on them and bake them and that’s what we ate. At one time or another she’d make feather pillows but not very often. My mom never made cheese but she made butter. When the milk got to a certain point, she would beat it and beat it with a fork. The only one that ate it was my dad. We children didn’t get that much. We only had the one cow and when she was giving milk there wasn’t all that much milk. My dad insisted that the calf had to get most of the milk. ” The staple of their diet was tortillas and beans. Doña Chu got up early every morning to grind the corn for the masa to make tortillas for her family of twelve children and of course, any other people in town that she felt she should help. They might not have much, but there were others with even less. It is a tribute to Doña Chu that she could find something to eat anywhere. It must have been healthy food: she was in her nineties when she passed away a few years ago.
Dolores Badilla Celaya, of the Moyza family, remembered how they collected wild foods such as prickly pear fruit, barrel cactus, and white mesquite gum (chuquita). Her mother made pechita of mesquite beans soaked and beaten until the pulp was off the seeds. Strained and mixed with sugar, milk and eggs, it made an interesting, once-a-year pudding. They had a farm as well as a ranch, but they left no stone unturned as far as wild foods were concerned, as well. They could feed themselves.
In any time of economic crisis, it is well that we know how to feed ourselves.
Comments
Got something to say?