Earlier this month, the 8th annual Agave Fest brought talks, performances, hikes and tastings to West Texas. Marfa Public Radio attended the festival and captured some of the talks, which you can find on our website.
The aim of Agave Fest is not just to celebrate the agave plant, but to use it as a jumping off point for celebrating the culture and ecology of the entire Chihuahuan Desert region through a variety of lenses — archaeology, poetry, language, food, and more.
Agave Fest is also an implicit celebration of the raconteur — a particularly gifted storyteller who shares history and information by weaving it throughout personal narratives and stories. Perhaps that’s too clinical of a definition for a skill that is obviously an art: the ability to marry the personal and the global through storytelling. In Far West Texas, raconteurism feels a fitting way to communicate the stories of this place, many of which are often traded casually over meals, at family gatherings, on porches, on the river, or on the trail.
In her talk on the modern history of rafting Santa Elena Canyon in what’s now Big Bend National park, journalist, essayist and river guide Sam Karas linked history to her own experiences hiking the canyon during a record-breaking dry spell for the Rio Grande. In particular, the image of Karas wading through the notorious rockslide at no flow, (and losing a shoe on the way), is a memorable one. In her talk, Karas delved into the conflict between the U.S. and Mexico over water, as well as the militarization of the region, but also highlighted the canyon’s history as a symbol of “wonder, hope, and international friendship” — moments when the river was envisioned as a connector between nations, the central artery of an international ppark, as opposed to a dividing line.
Over the past few years, the topic of the disappearing water has dominated the conversation about the Rio Grande. While this is more than merited (when you’ve seen the Rio Grande at full flow, a dry riverbed does indeed look like death), in her talk, Karas managed to open a window into the ways we might reimagine the river. In sharing her own experiences and images hiking the dry river, Karas illuminated new ways to explore the canyon. I came away with the idea that we can simultaneously mourn a dying river and embrace new ways of understanding it.
A couple of days later, another raconteur took the stage — linguist and historian Oscar Rodriguez (Lipan), who Marfa Public Radio listeners will know as the creator of the program “Caló,” exploring the borderland dialect of the same name. Rodriguez, who sometimes goes by the name "El Marfa," was raised in Ojinaga and the Permian Basin, and grew up speaking Caló, the dialect filling the barrios and countryside of his childhood. Caló is spoken from Denver, CO to Brownsville, TX on the U.S. side of the border and from Juarez to Matamoros on the Mexican side.
“Caló” (the program) is distinct in that each word that Rodriguez shares with us is wrapped into a story featuring familiar characters — Boy, Tita, El Lowrider, and many others — whose experiences help us contextualize the words we’re learning. What one might not know is that the stories Rodriguez tells on “Caló” each week come from his own life experiences, including people he’s known and encountered. Rodriguez’s Agave Fest talk didn’t include any visuals, just him on the stage, telling stories, looping from one to the next, weaving multiple characters and stories together as if we were all in a living room.
After the talk, a friend compared Rodriguez’s storytelling to the movie “Big Fish”: while one may suspect that details in Rodriguez’s tall tales are somewhat hyperbolic, it doesn’t matter. In fact, that’s actually the point — exaggeration reveals the lesson.
Another theme that emerged throughout the weekend was the centrality of migration and the search for shelter throughout history and across the wide span of the Chihuahuan Desert. Take the word ‘shelter’ itself. From Ruben Garcia, of Annunciation House in El Paso, we heard about shelter as a verb - as in, to take someone in or to protect them. From Erika Blecha, archaeologist at the Center for Big Bend Studies, we heard about the San Esteban Rock Shelter as a physical place where human and non-human beings ate, made tools, slept, cooked, and lived their lives for thousands of years. In Roberto Tejada’s poetry, the very meaning of words like ‘shelter’ and ‘place’ are called into question through a variety of voices (human and non-human) navigating connection, surveillance, and loss. And, in a talk by Jessica Lee Hamlin of the Shumla Archaeological Research & Education Center, we learned about the ways a physical shelter can help to protect not just people, but also the artwork they left behind, so that it can be studied and interpreted today, thousands of years after it was created.
Introducing the poems he would read from his new collection, “Carbonate of Copper,” poet Roberto Tejada spoke briefly about the book’s title. Carbonate of copper is a blue-green mineral derived from malachite and azurite, and was used as a pigment in Renaissance painting. It was considered the lesser pigment to the more expensive, rare, and bluer lapis lazuli. For Tejada, however, who is also an art historian, carbonate of copper represents a kind of sorcery for safekeeping. Copper carbonate is also what gives the Statue of Liberty her hue. It’s the color copper takes on when it has aged and been exposed to the elements. Transformation and adaptation are common themes in the poems; fitting not only for the title, but also for the time in which the collection was written — early 2021, still deep in the throes of the pandemic. I sensed that these poems, not just the collection’s title, were a kind of spell being cast. A spell that could shape-shift, animate the dead, grant invisibility, and expose with x-ray vision — a protection spell.
Erika Blecha, archaeologist at the Center for Big Bend Studies, was the last speaker of the festival.She shared some of the incredible findings recently uncovered in the San Esteban rock shelter, a formation along Alamito Creek just south of Marfa. San Esteban was in the headlines recently for some artifacts discovered there including a hunting kit likely used by people living in this area around 6500 years ago. Indeed, when we think of archaeology and what can be found in an ancient cave, we often think of human evidence. And hints at what life was like for people living thousands of years ago are, of course, incredibly compelling. But Blecha also emphasized that one of the most exciting prospects of excavating this remarkably well-preserved cave is the potential for discoveries about the plant and animal life in the area as well. What animals lived here, which are now extinct or have migrated elsewhere? What has the existence or disappearance of water near the rock shelter meant for the animals who lived there? The shelter has served as a site of protection, gathering, life, and death for so many beings throughout thousands of years, and the secrets it holds are just beginning to be uncovered.
What we found in visiting the talks and events of the Agave festival was something that was more than the sum of its parts. It served as a cogent reminder that despite the political weightiness of what many refer to simply as “the border,” this region is fundamentally continuous and complex. Throughout its long history and into the present, people who have inhabited this place have left their mark and told their stories, and Agave Fest is another way of continuing that tradition.
