Las Cruces folklorico

Let me set the scene for you at the Hatch Chile Festival: Last year’s festival queen sits on a folding chair munching a smoked turkey leg while Gib, up on the stage, announces the contestants in the fiddle contest.

A young boy, no more than 12, climbs up on stage and shyly announces he’ll be playing “Cottonpatch Rag.”

His grandfather, wearing a dusty white cowboy hat, stands stoically beside the young red-haired boy, accompanying him on an old guitar. The playing is lively, the beat sturdy and sure. A few cowboys put down their plates of gorditas or sweet tamales to hoof it out on the dance floor with their wives or girlfriends.

Gib thanks the young boy for the tune and admonishes everyone to go visit the food vendors and “Git yourself some of the finest chiles in the world. Ya eat a little Hatch chile tonight and you’ll get up in the morning and be deeply moved.”

The festival crowd, mostly local farmers from up and down the banks of the Rio Grande, moan at the joke.

It’s sweltering beneath the aluminum roof of the open-sided exhibition hall on this Labor Day weekend, but it’s even hotter out on the dusty fairgrounds where dozens of pickups, straining from beds stacked high with 40-lb. sacks of fleshy red, orange, yellow, and green chiles, line up cheek- to-jowl with farmers selling gunny sacks of freshly harvested green chiles which, for a few bucks more, they’ll roast for you in mesh drums spun over butane fires.

I buy a plate of chile rellenos and find an empty chair in front of the stage and listen to the fiddlers, watch the cowboys dance, and admire the beautiful folklorico dancers, in all-white dresses, as they stomp their feet and swirl up a breeze in the sweltering heat here in Hatch, the Chile Capital of the World.