I guess that's why we're on our way to Hatch - to find answers at the International Hatch Chili Festival. There are no books on the history of the chili pepper. There is little written discourse about from where they come, and what they did to the world. The lengthy English edition of Maguelonne Toussaint-Samat’s famous History of Food offers only a few pages on the subject. 
The chili evolved somewhere in South America, maybe Bolivia, and was cultivated there for two thousand year. Its seeds traveled by tribal trade routes to the coast of Brazil, as a medicinal, and then, by canoe migrations north. It was probably because it was seen as an important medicine of some sort.
As the descendents of Brazilian Indians moved up along the Atlantic coast, they seeded the Americas with an otherwise indistinct plant. When Columbus arrived in the Bahamas, the genus had already spread into cultivation both in Mexico and the islands by the Arawaks, Tainos, and Caribs. Most of the varieties of the genus Capsicum actually domesticated into their present-day varieties as foreigners in the Caribbean basin.
The Caribbean was important to the chili pepper, because small islands are like biological breeding grounds for variation.
Columbus was after the eastern black peppercorns; like other explorers of his time, spice was his motivation. It is no wonder, then, that he called the plant a pepper, and claimed it was superior to the 'old peppers' which he was sent to find.
We crossed out of the White Sands Missile Range, and over the Organ Mountains, into the city of Las Cruces.
We decided to take a walk up the mountains near Las Cruces, in the evening when the sun casts its long glow over humble Las Cruces. When each truck crossing a dirt road fifty miles away is seen by its plume of dust high in the still air. I am thinking about that border guard, how he must be home right now, in his shitty trailer park, playing war with tin soldiers or squeezing his face at his wife and yelling loudly. I wonder how my wife, marching along, might not enjoy a pursuit of answers about the chili pepper at all - mad border guards, long drives, crappy desert towns.
It was quite a relief then, when she crouched down and said she didn't know there were toads in the desert. 'Huh?' I said, and looked at the creeping thing. "Oh my gosh," I said (she had trained me not to say 'Oh my God!' "...it's a horny toad." Now, Jane may not care much about those funny looking lizards, but she lit up into a bright smile when she recognized the importance of the stupid lizard to me.
Not just that, but we were off to a stay in the grandest hotel in Las Cruces. It's so grand, The Meson de Mesilla is not even in Las Cruces, but a small outlier called La Mesilla, where, I tell Jane - I hear they have something other than Mexican food.
All that salsa, all that hot sauce, all that corn. It gets to you after a while. When we arrived at the Meson de Mesilla, the clerk said they decided to close the restaurant down early. And why not, there's plenty of Mexican food in town.
We found a restaurant. Yeah, it was so Mexican, that Pancho Villa once visited it. Pancho Villa, and Geronimo too, they claimed. One was the world’s first modern Guerilla. The other created the first incidence of modern warfare. When the United States went after Pancho, they employed trucks and airplanes for the first time in combat. It seems like everything in modern warfare begins right here, in Southern New Mexico.
