Abuelas Across Borders: Maintaining Traditional Foods in the Chihuahuan Desert

The Chihuahuan Desert provides geographic continuity across the US-Mexico border, allowing traditional foodways, supported by place-based ways of eating, to continue from one side to the other. However, changes in climatic patterns, such as extreme heat and water scarcity, pose a threat to traditional foodways. This study explores the food-centered life histories of abuelas who migrated to the US and the challenges they face in maintaining the traditional northern Mexican diet amid climate change. Attention is given to historical events that have reorganized the borderland landscape, which affects communal water access that supports traditional subsistence activities. Particularly, the vital structures of acequias, gravity-fed irrigation canals, which provided water enabling families to engage in subsistence gardening that made them relatively food self-sufficient.