The Poetics of Fire: Metaphors of Chile Eating in the Borderlands (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780826365545)

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.

Author: Victor M. Valle
ISBN-10: 082636554X
ISBN-13: 9780826365545
Publisher: Unm Press
Language: English
Published: 11/15/2023
Pages: 312
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.90lbs
Size: 8.90h x 5.98w x 1.02d