ABSTRACT
Antonito is six miles north of the New Mexico state line in the San Luis Valley, an eight thousand square-mile cold desert valley lying at approximately eight thousand feet above sea level between the San Juan and Sangre de Cristo mountains. Antonito is located in Conejos County in the Upper Rio Grande region on the northern frontier of greater Mexico. 3 The population of Antonito is 90% Hispanic and thus it is an excellent site to study the contemporary experience of rural Chicanas and Chicanos. My forthcoming book, tentatively titled Mexicanas’ Stories of Food, Identity and Land in the San Luis Valley of Colorado , 4 gives a full exposition of how my nineteen interviewees described land and water, defi ned food and meals, and enacted family, gender, and community relations. In this paper, I use excerpts from one woman’s interviews to make two points-fi rst, to affi rm the value of the food-centered life history methodology, and second, to suggest how women can display differential consciousness through their practices and beliefs surrounding food.
