Pete Warzel Reviews Patrick Joyce's "Remembering Peasants"
/Book Review and a Commentary
Publisher: Scribner (February 20, 2024)
Length: 400 pages
ISBN13: 9781668031087
On backorder.
By Pete Warzel
I was drawn to this book for strictly subjective reasons. I consistently, constantly, tell my family and friends, “I love peasant food.” Said slyly, but whole-heartedly, and honestly. Our condo in Boulder, Colorado, is three blocks from an establishment called Bohemian Biergarten that I do not get to visit often enough. Sausages, sauerkraut, Jaeger Schnitzel, spaetzle, crispy gnocchi, goulash, and bier/beer. Czech beer, German beer, Austrian beer. No microbrew fruit beer. Simple, earthy food. Street tacos, menudo, tamales, and cerveza in our world here in New Mexico.
The craving is in my genes, jump started when I began doing business in Central Europe many years ago. I felt at home in the center of Europe, and yes partly due to the art and architecture, music, the history of empires, boundaries in constant flux, the long road from there to here, but also because of the evocative feeling of the countryside and traditions in the villages – the customs of hunting (though I do not hunt), local celebrations, church rituals, superstitions, and somehow, inbred social memories of people who looked familiar to me.
My grandmother Warzel, Susan, Zuzana, Baba, spoke no English, only Russian, having immigrated before War I, married, and moved into a home in the small Russian Orthodox enclave on the eastside of Buffalo, New York. We are not sure from where she came, though most likely what is now Slovakia. I wonder at her feelings about the house she moved into on Benzinger Street, coming from one likely much more rudimentary in amenities and size. It must have felt massive, too much to handle for a peasant. At the end of the street, addressed actually on Ideal Street, a proper name for the location, is Saints Peter and Paul Orthodox Church, the anchor of this “village” within an American city. On nearby Lovejoy Street, also a perfect street name for the property, was Warzel’s Tavern, another anchor in the “village,” operated by an offshoot of the family that I really did not know.
She, Baba, was small, always smiling, hands gnarled, knuckles swollen, gray hair in a bun, and loving. One of my earliest memories is of her and me in the attic of the worn, two-story house, where light came in from the windowed eaves, front and back, and she handmade very thin noodles, on a large wooden table. I watched in anticipation because there was nothing as good as her noodles in chicken broth, nothing. (I passed on the herring at New Year’s.) We did not speak intelligibly, although she spoke, telling me what she was doing at each step with me not translating, but following. We understood each other. She would pinch my cheek smiling and say “Schnudik” (shnudik, shnudic, snudick?), which my aunt, her daughter, told me years later translated to “piss pot.”
This all might echo in parts, New Mexico, and the correlation is sound. The book really has nothing to do with our state, though the descriptions of community in a small farm agrarian culture that is disappearing has more than serendipitous connections to northern New Mexico. The conclusions Professor Joyce reaches in his book have direct implications for what we are doing here with history, preservation, cultural continuity, and our present and future social concerns and correlation, especially in Santa Fe and its surroundings.
Patrick Joyce is Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Manchester, Irish, descended from “peasants” in County Mayo, Ireland, “Joyce Country” as he calls it, one source of deliberation in his social history of peasants. He and his book are each a revelation.
The book proper is an extensively researched history of peasantry primarily in Europe, and its quickening demise in our time. “Figures tell the European story in stark fashion….In France, once the greatest peasant country in Europe, the percentage of people in agriculture was only 3% in 2019….By 2021 agriculture accounted for only a little 1 percent of GDP in the EU.”
In a report by KUNM, the University of New Mexico FM radio station, in 2023, Tomás Vigil, speaks at his family farmhouse in Pilar, New Mexico. "’ Why not preserve the farm that's in the heart of it,’ he asks. He worries his family will one day sell the land, developers will come and an old way of life, a historic community will be gone.” That is the crux of this book, here and worldwide.
What is a Peasant? Chapter 2 - “A peasant is a country person, a person of the land. That is all the word in its original innocence means.” But the elements of that country person are not as simple, though simply clear. “…What it highlights is the family and the family economy. The family anchors things in the peasant world. The essential point is that the land – whether it is self-owned, rented, aspired to or enserfed – is understood to be social rather than an economic entity.” And the personal traits are of a complex simplicity in demeanor: silent, conservative, frugal, hard-working, an ethic of soundness and craft in their work, tied to the seasons by a circular sense of time, a belief system that may be Protestant or most likely Roman Catholic, but still infused with the old religions and superstitions of nature, and finally identity in “group solidarity.” These traits add up to something less than acceptable to the more refined world of institutional education and money. “The German Bauer derives from Bur in Low German. In English, it is pronounced like boor, which is where the English word “boor” derives from.” Boor? An unrefined, ill-mannered person. A peasant to the people of the cities. Bauer is the German word for peasant, farmer, or neighbor.
“They were outside history…they were outside time.” So the peasant.
The center of this world is “…the ‘home place’ as the house and farm are called in Ireland.” Also the village, the gathering of like people tried by the same battles against nature and government restrictions. Home, farm, village – querencia in the language of northern New Mexico, the safe place, the center. “You go into the house and are on familiar ground as all houses are more or less the same.” The home place is a shared identity.
Professor Joyce’s conclusions in real-time are pertinent to us all. He centers his thoughts on history and heritage in our times where “everything happens now,” and what that means to the act of memory, or teaching history. His distaste for the word “heritage” is upfront and direct, “bereft of context”, engendering “depthlessness” in history. “Heritage is thus the form of the past for those who neither have the time nor the interest to ask questions of it….” And so a “museumification” occurs, “a post-colonial nostalgia” played out through the “…fantasies of second homeowners, for who the newly acquired peasant house was the material expression of the peasant soul.” That allows for “…unmediated access to what in Britain became ‘the good life’, one lived like the peasants of yore….” Sound familiar? Once strictly agrarian homes on Acequia Madre and Canyon Road, as witnessed by the acequias still visible there, lost to their original function of watering for subsistence farming, are now the core of expanded homes that provide a true Santa Fe experience.
I once had a discussion with former Santa Fe Mayor Javier Gonzales about the tension of the potential for development and the restrictions of historic code, specific to downtown and adjacent historic districts. We talked about the looming presence of the city itself becoming a museum, and that museums held things in disuse, not living but on artificial respiration, not useful except to gaze upon a past alien to us now. To my horror I saw an Instagram post from the city of Santa Fe, New Mexico, several years ago, that proclaimed that the city itself as the best museum of all in a city of museums.
It seems to me that initiatives that take the vision from out of the preservation and museum norms may be the way to best “preserve” the cultural history of a place, by preserving directly the centers, the homes, of the history itself. Initiatives like the repair and stabilization of traditional homes to keep them habitable and maintain ownership within the family could be a positive step forward. The Endangered Properties Program by the Historic Santa Fe Foundation and Habitat for Humanity, as well as the work done by Nuevo Mexico Profundo, begin to foster a new norm of preservation. They focus on the at-risk cultural history and landscapes, and take a direct step in making sound the homes and churches of the traditional cultures of Santa Fe and the state, ensuring continuation of real life in real time.
The danger of this is of course the “knowing better” by the outsider, we who look in and pontificate – that whiff of denigration that comes with any effort to save or interpret what has gone before by someone other. I think even Professor Joyce would admit to a bit of that potential. It recalls the posture of General Stephen Watts Kearney on the Las Vegas, New Mexico plaza: We come amongst you as friends - not as enemies; as protectors not as conquerors. We come among you for your benefit, not for your injury. In other words, “I am from the home office and here to help.”
Professor Joyce’s writing is superb, a literary book, not just a pedantic history or repository for statistics. There is poetry in his writing, enhanced by his frequent citations from Seamus Heaney and John Berger, who both wrote of peasants, the earth, work and beliefs in Ireland and France respectively. His history is eloquent. His ability to connect the dots to a larger issue, that of memory, remembering, and how to do and not do it during our time when “the ephemeral came to be highly prized” is an even larger gift to us reading this in northern New Mexico. It rings true close to home, and hopefully we learn from the wisdom he presents. Remembering Peasants is a stunning work in history. “The past is never over.” Or, “The presence of the past is my theme.” So well said by the Professor. We call Santa Fe “The City Different”, but in the end it is not so much different than every countryside made citified worldwide, moving the original agrarian culture to a social level looked down upon, and then wanting it to be saved by the rest of us for the present. We are truly not so different than any other history in our new world of instant gratification, and “If you are not on the tourist trail, things can be hard.…”
