Spanish class, Enchilada Pie are lessons this Colorado girl should have embraced long ago.
My mom was right.
I should have learned to speak Spanish.
When my sister was in high school, she took French. It was a romantic language, the language of Alexandre Dumas and Antoine de Saint-Exupery, and she had visions of herself strolling along the Seine in Paris, sipping café au lait at a boulangerie in Nice, painting en plein air in Provence. Our mother, much more practical than her teenaged daughter, encouraged her to take Spanish. She did not.
When my parents first moved to Colorado from Nebraska, they landed in Trinidad, a small city in southern Colorado that today is 51 percent Hispanic (according to city-data.com). When they first drove into town, late in the evening on Labor Day in 1957, with a 3-week-old baby in their arms, the only place open for a bite to eat was a bar and every face they saw was brown. Although she had lived on her own in a city for a number of years before getting married, our mother had lived a fairly sheltered life, exposed mostly to other people who looked like her and thought like her and shared her history. To say Trinidad, Colorado, was culture shock for a young mother from Waverly, Nebraska, might be an understatement, but she and my father were welcomed there, even embraced, and they came to love Las Animas County and the people who made it home.
The lessons they learned there stayed with them when they left Trinidad for bigger, whiter cities. Today, Colorado is about 20 percent Latino. From the “get,“ my parents were aware of that, so when my siblings and I were at the point in our education when we were required to study a foreign language, they did everything but insist that all of us to take Spanish.
My sister started the rebellion when she insisted that yes, she would in fact use French because someday she would go to France. My older brother, who was not particularly interested in romance languages or world travel, also took French — for reasons that escaped everyone but him. I took French, not because I was convinced that someday I would walk the streets of Paris — even though I’m sure I used that as a rationale — but because my sister took it. Only my younger brother took the advice, taking Spanish for a couple of years in high school, but I think it’s fair to say that he did only as much as was required and had no real intention of learning the language.
My mother, of course, was right: Knowing Spanish would have been a useful skill — in the inner city Denver hospital where my sister worked with the families of medically-fragile newborns; in the city that gave its main roads Spanish names (Vermijo Avenue, Costilla and Tejon streets, Capulin Drive) where my older brother raised his family; in the Eastern Plains middle school, about 40 percent Hispanic, where my younger brother started his school administration career; in the six-county, Latino-majority southern Colorado valley where I was a young reporter.
I began my newspaper career at the Monte Vista Journal, a weekly paper serving the largest community in the San Luis Valley, the biggest paper in a five-paper “chain.” Fewer than 4,000 people lived in Monte Vista then, around 60 percent of them Latino. About two years later, I moved to a five-day daily in a slightly larger town — Alamosa — about 17 miles to the east but with a similar racial demographic. Most of the people who ran these towns were white: the city council members, the school board, the municipal judge and the district attorney, the police chief, the landowners and educators, the newspaper’s publisher and editor and new reporter. The people who kept the town running were almost all Hispanic: the shop workers and waitresses and child care-givers, the bar owners, the migrant field workers and potato warehouse workers, the construction workers. It was a shocking disparity and a difficult line for journalists to maneuver.
Maybe the most glaring example of this and the experience that, in my mind, underscored how right my mother was happened when I was sent to cover a news conference in Antonito. Antonito is a tiny community of fewer than 800 people today (about 1,100 when I was there in the 1980s), nearly 90 percent of them Hispanic. It is known for being the home of the oldest church in Colorado, Our Lady of Guadalupe Parish in Conejos, but that day the family of an escaped convict had asked the media to come speak to them.
The convict — I can’t remember his name now — and two other men had escaped from a prison in New Mexico. As you would expect, there was a fairly extensive search; the three split up; two of them ended up back in prison and the third one was killed by law enforcement. It was mostly a New Mexico story, so our little paper only gave it cursory attention. Antonito though was part of our coverage area, although it was so far south and so sleepy that it almost never made the pages of the paper. I’m kind of surprised they even sent a reporter to that hastily-called event. The man’s family was calling for justice, believing — like so many, too many do today — that their loved one, no matter his transgressions, didn’t deserve to die at the hands of the people sworn to protect us. I don’t remember enough of the story to know if the outrage was justified, but I do know their grief was real and their questions unanswered.
There were only two or three reporters who showed up that day. When I got there, the escapee’s wife — or was it his girlfriend? — was ready to read a statement.
“Do you speak Spanish?” she asked. When I admitted that, no, I did not, she agreed to translate the statement to English but she seemed annoyed or disappointed. Then she asked, did I think the paper could run the original Spanish text next to the story. She handed me a copy of her statement and asked me to take it to my editors. I did, but what ran in the paper was only my story, brief and succinct. Hopefully the quotes, all in English, conveyed what the woman was trying to say.
Spanish would have been better. Spanish would have spoken to the people she wanted to hear her in the language of their history and life experience, Spanish would have touched them where they lived. It would have honored her loss in a way that a second language could not.
I don’t think the paper owed her that, but it would have been nice if we could have given her, and the Spanish-speaking community that informed every part of life in the San Luis Valley, that grace.
Today, as the country grows browner and the wisdom of our elders grows louder and simple requests grow into demands, I think the gift would have been given.
The Pie
My mother was a very good cook. She knew what flavors complemented each other, loved and collected cookbooks, and sometimes took risks in the kitchen. She also had four children in six years, who were not always easy to please. There are photos of my brother and I having full-blown meltdowns over a few peas on our dinner plates, and there’s a story my mom used to tell about me sitting at the table for hours — until bedtime came and my parents relented — because I refused to eat spaghetti. As we got older, there were a few dishes that my mom made that all four of us remember hating: side meat and boiled potatoes, cheese souffle and Enchilada Pie.
The other day, I was looking through my mom’s old recipe file and found her recipe for Enchilada Pie. I gingerly took it out of the box and carefully unfolded the yellowed paper, then read the ingredients, expecting to see all sorts of kid-unfriendly food. But I didn’t. I found instead a simple to prepare, easy to eat “pie” that should appeal to anyone who likes Mexican food. I do — and I have it in my mind that I always have. But, as far as Enchilada Pie is concerned, that apparently has not always been the case. So when I found the recipe, I decided to make it, just to see if it was as tasty as it looked or if my childhood taste buds were indeed correct. I’m happy to report that I was just being a kid with a stubborn streak or an immature palate when I refused to eat my mother’s offering.
I made this pie for dinner one night while my sister was visiting. She also had memories of not really like it when we were kids, but she only had good things to say about it this time around.
Enchilada Pie smells fantastic while it’s cooking and has a satisfying southwestern flavor, but it is worth noting that it is very mild. If you want to ramp up the spice index, you can easily increase the amount of chile powder and/or garlic or you can choose hotter chiles.
The recipe
Enchilada Pie
10 corn tortillas
2 pounds ground beef
1 medium clove garlic, minced
1 medium onion, chopped
1 7-ounce can diced green chiles, drained
1 can cream of mushroom sauce
1 1-pound can of stewed tomatoes
½ teaspoon chili powder
Salt and pepper to taste
1 pound extra sharp cheddar cheese, shredded
Cut tortillas in quarters. Dip quarters in a small amount of hot cooking oil for just a few seconds on both sides. The tortillas should be slightly crisp. Drain on paper towel.
Crumble beef into heated skillet. Add garlic and onion. Cook over medium heat, stirring occasionally, until meat loses red color. Drain off grease. Add chiles, soup and tomatoes. Add chili powder, salt and pepper.
Arrange half of tortilla quarters in rows slightly overlapping in greased, shallow 9x13 baking dish.* Spoon half of meat mixture on top of tortillas. Sprinkle half the cheese on top of meat mixture. Repeat layers, ending with cheese. Cover loosely with foil. Bake 45-60 minutes.
Decorate with extra chips or avocado slices, if desired.
Dish may be assembled several hours before baking. If you store it in the refrigerator, allow it to come to room temperature before baking.
* If you prefer a smaller dish, you can make in two smaller baking dishes instead of one 9x13 pan. I used a deep dish pie plate which worked fine. However, if you do use two smaller dishes, you might want to crisp up some extra tortillas to ensure you have enough for both dishes. Also, this recipe can easily be halved for one smaller “pie.”
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