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Published by UNM Press
Distributed by Simon & Schuster
Table of Contents
About The Book
Winner of the 2024 Western History Association David J. Weber Prize for best non-fiction book on Southwest History.
In The Poetics of Fire, Pulitzer prize–winning journalist and Chicano author Victor M. Valle posits the chile as a metaphor for understanding the shared cultural histories of ChicanX and LatinX peoples from preconquest Mesoamerica to twentieth-century New Mexico. Valle uses the chile as a decolonizing lens through which to analyze preconquest Mesoamerican cosmology, early European exploration, and the forced conversion of Native peoples to Catholicism as well as European and Mesoamerican perspectives on food and place. Assembling a rich collection of source material, Valle highlights the fiery fruit’s overarching importance as evidenced by the ubiquity of references to the plant over several centuries in literature, art, official documents, and more to offer a new eco-aesthetic reading—a reframing of culinary history from a pluralistic, non-Western perspective.
In The Poetics of Fire, Pulitzer prize–winning journalist and Chicano author Victor M. Valle posits the chile as a metaphor for understanding the shared cultural histories of ChicanX and LatinX peoples from preconquest Mesoamerica to twentieth-century New Mexico. Valle uses the chile as a decolonizing lens through which to analyze preconquest Mesoamerican cosmology, early European exploration, and the forced conversion of Native peoples to Catholicism as well as European and Mesoamerican perspectives on food and place. Assembling a rich collection of source material, Valle highlights the fiery fruit’s overarching importance as evidenced by the ubiquity of references to the plant over several centuries in literature, art, official documents, and more to offer a new eco-aesthetic reading—a reframing of culinary history from a pluralistic, non-Western perspective.
Product Details
- Publisher: UNM Press (November 15, 2023)
- Length: 312 pages
- ISBN13: 9780826365552
Raves and Reviews
A deep exploration into chile's ontology, mythology, epigenetics, and indigenized place-making.--Enrique R. Lamadrid, coeditor of Water for the People: The Acequia Heritage of New Mexico in a Global Context
In this brilliant analysis, chiles emerge as protagonists in the multicultural wars that date from the sixteenth century to the present. Victor M. Valle calls out all the contradictions that entangle culinary practices of heat and flavor with prejudice, misunderstandings, and derision and offers instead erudite theorizations of meaning and power through a taste-based methodology that respects the botanical product as much as its fiery eaters--both equally qualified warriors of memory and dignity.--Maribel Alvarez, coeditor of Hungry for Change: Borderlands Food and Water in the Balance
In this brilliant analysis, chiles emerge as protagonists in the multicultural wars that date from the sixteenth century to the present. Victor M. Valle calls out all the contradictions that entangle culinary practices of heat and flavor with prejudice, misunderstandings, and derision and offers instead erudite theorizations of meaning and power through a taste-based methodology that respects the botanical product as much as its fiery eaters--both equally qualified warriors of memory and dignity.--Maribel Alvarez, coeditor of Hungry for Change: Borderlands Food and Water in the Balance
“…this book makes a significant contribution to the fields of folklore studies, food studies, environmental studies, Indigenous studies, Latin American studies, and Latinx studies… The Poetics of Fire is an indispensable book for considering the place of heat, specifically through chile eating, in Mesoamerican aesthetics.”
– Mónica B. Ocasio Vega, Journal of American Folklore
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