Texas Organic Mexican Jews for Jesus

“I actually like weeding,” says Noemi Alvarez, who is a week away from being fifteen.  “And nobody likes weeding.  But I don’t like picking green beans.”  Everything coming out of her mouth sounds normal, but life is nothing but for this young lady. 

This will all be very confusing unless we back up a couple decades.  Noemi’s parents, Sylvia and Miguel, are both Mexicans who came to America as teenagers.  Sylvia studied teaching in El Paso, and Miguel—well, Miguel was just a tourist, spending a few days in America when he saw some boys playing football, a sport he’d never seen before.  A few minutes after joining in, he scored a fifty-five-yard field goal.  A scout signed him nearly on the spot, and he played for the Oilers for a few years before starting a small dump-truck business in Austin. 

1n 1984 Miguel and Sylvia, having added a small boy and a baby to their assets, bought ten acres of land in Lexington, a quiet landscape of neatly tilled fields and clouds of dust stirred up by pickup trucks.  The soil was sand; the space was almost entirely wooded.  “You can grow watermelons here, some black-eyed peas maybe,” old-timers told them.  “Don’t hold your breath for much beyond.” Sylvia remembered warm milk from her grandparents’ farm in Zacatecas and home-grown honey.  She planted a little garden for the summer: tomatoes, peppers, squash.  Surprisingly, they grew.  The soil is sandy as ever, but they manage to coax a surprising abundance of produce out of it. 

Each year the view out the kitchen window changes; this is a trial-and-error family. They milked goats for a while; they raised cattle; they had a few hives of bees for mesquite honey and to pollinate the squash.  They tried raising broiler chickens, and they attempted quail and turkey.  Last year they grew grapes, which they won’t be doing again.  They made strawberry ice cream and brewed Compost Tea.  Harlequin bugs chomped on their arugula leaves; deer meandered in and munched all the broccoli; hawks swooped down and plucked off chickens (“It was beautiful to watch, actually,” says Miguel.  “Then it was like, Oh NO, my chickens!!”).  Unfazed, they reviewed their mistakes and corrected them, planting ‘trap crops’ like early arugula to distract the harlequin bugs, building taller, electric fences to keep the deer out, and stringing together an elaborate overhead spider’s web of cables beribboned with red flags to divert the hawks. 

Projects not abandoned?  Herbs and heirlooms, raised beds and French biointensive methods, and planting in large part according to the biodynamic calendar developed by Rudolf Steiner.  About 600 of their 800 free-range chickens have been killed one way or another (raccoons, hawks, foxes), but they plan to persevere.  This year 12,000 strawberry plants have gone in, but they’ll be covering a few rows with red rather than black plastic, just to see what happens.  One wonders where two untrained farmers picked up the skills.  “I read a lot,” volunteers Sylvia. 

She’s the most voluble about why they farm the way they do.  “Chemicals destroy the land and deplete the soil,” she says,  “not to mention what they do to the human body.”  Organic farming is more work, because of the constant battle against weeds and pests—but using open-pollinated heirloom seeds (rather than hybrids) and not buying chemicals means they can save money that conventional farmers otherwise spend. “Farming is another way of worshipping God,” adds Sylvia seriously.  Then she chuckles.  “You’re close to the Creation but you’re on your knees too!”  She likes the raised beds best, she explains, because they’re most productive and Miguel can’t drive his tractor over the land “I’d love to farm with draught horses,” she sighs.  But Miguel is the one who does all the tilling and ploughing, and he likes his tractor better.  “You pick your battles,” she says.  Noemi’s perspective on farming is simpler but no less eloquent: “I always think it’s pretty awesome that from a little seed you can grow a humongous plant.”

Both Noemi and Miguel Jr. were home-schooled by Sylvia, a former teacher; they take tests every few years and otherwise are left alone. Noemi meets most of her friends through ballet or church instead.  The family is of Sephardic Jewish origin, but have accepted Jesus and belong to a Christian church, although they still celebrate some Jewish holidays.  They commuted to the Back to the Land ministries church in Waco for years, which had a lot of Jewish members, but they now attend a Christian church closer by, where Jews are in the minority.  “A lot of kids at church want to come to the farm because they think it’s cool seeing cows, but we don’t have any cows, but whatever,” says Noemi, all run-on sentences, bubbly and insouciant.  “The last four rows of broccoli my friend James from church and I planted, that was fun.”

Miguel Jr. goes to college in Austin now, but whenever he comes home he splits wood, kills chickens, and helps with everything else.  Noemi divides her time rather evenly between her schoolwork (having just covered Christopher Columbus), the ballet (she’s a bon-bon in this year’s Christmas Austin production of the Nutcracker), and the weeding and harvesting required by the farm.  The family goes to two farmers markets, the Saturday market in downtown Austin and one on Wednesdays in front of Whole Foods, an Austin-based company.  90% of everything they harvest gets sold then; the rest goes into 30 CSA boxes.  “I would like to do more CSAs,” says Sylvia.  “But I would not want to stop selling at the farmer’s market.  Not only is it a way of marketing for the CSA, but I also like the personal contact with customers.”  Noemi chimes in: “The farmers markets are cool.  We know the names of all the regulars and the kids of some of the other vendors are my friends.” Sylvia is particularly excited about the new regulations wherein vendors can accept WIC vouchers; food stamps will not be far behind. 

And future projects for the family?  Miguel plans to raise quail again, enthused by the rising popularity of game birds.  The family lets fields lie fallow every seven years, and because the first big chunk of land since the farm’s commercial existence will be hibernating next year, the income from the quail is meant to make up for the loss of arable land.  Miguel has built a clay oven where he’ll be roasting the quail to sell in the farmers market and at the farmstand the family hopes to have in place by next summer.  “We’ve laid down 12,000 strawberry plants, so we’ll need help picking,” says Sylvia.  “When the farmstand is ready, people can come and pick their own!”  They will also be building a commercial kitchen, out of which Sylvia hopes to do more canning and preserving, mentioning that she has good recipes for pickled watermelon rind and salsa.  The family would like to build housing to accommodate their farmworkers and perhaps WWOOFers or interns.  They might buy a dairy cow and split shares of it with neighbors so that everyone can enjoy unpasteurized milk. 

Until then, though, everyone is focused on a big event two weeks from now: Noemi’s quinceañera, her fifteenth birthday and coming-out party. For the last six weeks, she and a soccer team’s worth of friends have been practicing their waltz and salsa moves every Sunday in preparation for the dance on the big day.  The ladies have gotten long, satiny dresses made in Laredo; the boys are getting their tuxedos fitted over the weekend.  “We won’t be at the farmers market that day,” says Sylvia.  “But we’ll back the following Saturday.”

In October and November 2006, I meandered circuitously between San Francisco to Miami under the auspices of Minnesota-based nonprofit Renewing the Countryside, interviewing farmers, ecologists, musicians and activists for a book on youth revitalizing rural landscapes all across America.  Hero-bosses Jan Joannides and Brett Olsen have allowed me to post my interviews here, but look for them in the Youth Renewing the Countryside book, due out in the spring of 2008. 

Comments

[noemi alvarez]

coool we have the same name,
my name is also noemi alvarez.....