Pati of the Plane

Elliott "Aspen" W. Smith

One day, when I was sipping on some iced coffee at a café in Boulder. Underneath the towering Flatirons of my Coloradan home staring over my home like sentinels, there was a television playing some random public broadcasting channel videos such as Antiques Roadshow. However, upon the ending, another show came up which caught my immediate attention. I kept my already naturally wide but now widened pupils to that screen until the program ended. It shocked me to my soul that someone created it. This is because it showed the same Aridoamerican Plane that introduced itself to me, the one that people refused to believe even existed when I told them of it due to their ancient-style imperial condescension towards anything with the word Mexican in it. The one that the media refused to talk about. The one where diversity as a concept doesn’t show its face in propagandistic elites looking to destroy cultures for profit and enslave the rest is casually embodied in the souls of the locals. The show and its brilliant and charismatic host had managed to do something I view as revolutionary to the story of this land.

She showed the land and its people, not for how the world perceived them, but how they actually existed…

Our fabled hostess…

La Frontera with Pati Jinich is a PBS program which goes into the details of the US/Mexican border, as well as its culinary traditions. Its creator and host, Pati Jinich is a world-famous chef of Mexican Cuisine. Originally immigrating from Mexico City to the US, she eventually developed a homesickness for her country, and began expressing this through her love of the Mexican Culinary traditions. She has written multiple cookbooks and has hosted some famous cooking shows such as Pati’s Mexican Table. She interestingly cooked for the White House under the Obama Administration during Cinco De Mayo as well. I hear yourself wondering, why do I, a Spenglerian, take so much interest in a cooking show which appeals to an age and sex demographic far out of my range as a young History-based, Anglophone young male? The show carries with it a very anthropological implication. Interestingly, even the idea of food and to a lesser extent music being center and forefront in this show has them show a lot of the foundational cultivation elements involving the land which I believe to carry civilizational implications.

The show documents her traveling to various communities along the border of the United States and Mexico The series’ episodes are similar, with an episode following a particular family or group of people and what they are cooking, or some unique cultural aspect involved. These micro stories all mesh into a broader narrative as she moves further across the border, which could be an attempt to show these lands in a Radiating and Spirilic format of analogies rather than directness as a narrative instead of a basic and more linear format of certain other documentary shows. She presents this place as I do and that I saw, a unified and internal land rather than the external of two binary countries. A people who don’t exist because of the border and outside perception of “two clashing cultures” but as one agitated by the annoyance of outside condescension. One which showed pride in the three major people groups that call this land home.

While there are more episodes. For those shorter on time, there are two episodes I highly recommend which I will briefly comment on as I would rather the episodes and the people of this land speak for themselves. This article is also a bit shortened so as to not take away from the show. There are aspects of high modernity in this series, especially with farming. But as will also be shown, there remains a particular psychological distancing from it.

The Hybrid Culture of New Mexico and Chihuahua

Brief Synopsis: Mainly about the relationship between Southern New Mexico and Chihuahua. Ronald Rael, the architect I referenced in Earth and Mud appears in this episode as well interestingly. 

Much like how migratory animals from Temperate North America and Mesoamerica both migrate to the Sky Islands from this land’s biodiversity, The Aridoamerican Plane is the Human equivalent of this phenomenon, a perceived dead land brimming with more life than most other places. Whether Uto-Aztecans (and their Mesoamerican Cousins), Athabaskans, Hispanics, or North European Anglos. Whether the Jaguars, Ocelots, Black Bears or Mustangs.

The Culinary Roots of the Arizona - Sonora Border 

Brief Synopsis: This episode is mainly a look at the Arizona and Sonora Border. Unsurprisingly due to the presence of the O’odham in this area (specifically Tohono O’odham), the episode is much more indigenized in tone.

The Ontological implications of these two younger people’s shirts and what they say is a bit too on the nose to the nature of this place. These may be likely liberal-leaning university students, but in my interactions, the rural-leaning conservatives seem to share a very similar opinion.

I recommend people to watch both of these episodes and the rest of the series if they want to not only hear my ramblings but actually want to see the people of the Aridoamerican Plane as well. Pay close attention to how they cook, cultivate, talk, how they dress, what they are wearing, and what they believe in and their ethos. This is a very bright and welcoming show, a lot like the people of the land. However, there are some very dark aspects of this culture. The culture that produces Holistic Hippies also produces Cartels. A clash of demonic Industrial Civilization and Nature, and a realization that those within this land cannot dominate nature leads to an eternal cycle of Healing and Violence, one of which the indigenous politics was well aware of and one of which the early Spanish Settlers found themselves in of which only later Anglos leveled to make way for Modernity’ pseudomorphosis. This is not a black mark on the land, all High Cultures harbor an internal darkness). However, they internalize this darkness separately. It also isn’t a black mark on Ms. Jinich. Her depiction of the land is the one I saw, the one that compelled me to such a profound point to write about this land and the rich culture it harbors in its arid yet biodiverse soil. It must warm in a world that demonizes that land. Beauty and Darkness go hand in hand.

Although the Borderland region greatly embodies the soul of this land and culture and she has shown the raw essence, I have found many signs of this culture well past the borderlands that she shows. Many of the forms exist hundreds of miles inland in either direction. It washes up on my doorstep constantly. The desert also seems to follow the Mexican-American diaspora wherever they go and the ever-evolving Adobe indirectly seems to as well. There is no such thing as a Fronterizo, only Aridoamericans separated by the politics of a dying decedent civilizational form. Pati Jinich’s show sings to an internal reality only those west of the hundredth meridian can truly understand, a culture and spiritual ethos hidden by the hood of Anglo-American hegemony. However, if a culture is this firm in the belly of the most culturally influential empire in human history, one which has terraformed European and Japanese/Korean culture entirely, then the implications for what comes after it shows a separate destiny than the forever ethnically clashing civilizations past the date of demographic oblivion this land is depicted as. Though this land carries a new ethos and culture form, one day it will no longer be La Frontera, instead it will be La Kultur.