CHIAPAS, HISTORY AND AGRICULTURE OF THE HABANERO

I have a late start today because I was working my fingers to the bone. I work like a mule in the mines. It was a quarter after two and I found myself sitting near the front of an operations management lecture on issues in facility location. It's not quite the attention grabber of say, the history of Blackbeard or Cherokee raiding parties so to say I lost interest is a confident assumption. I lasted though forty-five minutes before my mind finally said, "enough of this rubbish," and left my body there, stiff, my eyes heavy, my ears fried from a linear programming tutorial, gasping for breath, disoriented and fairly hungry. I opened my eyes and was back in 1994-95, standing in the orange glow of a central Mexican bus depot. We spoke with a heavy set, hairy Mexican bus driver with gold teeth who reeked of cheap booze and marijuana cigarettes. We could see pickpockets and perverts in the shadows circling us like jackals. Before long we were herded onto a bus filled with fugatives and gun runners. It was a Comedy of Errors from the start. Those present at the time were myself, my mother, my twin sister, my younger sister, my aunt and my cousin. We were in our seats and the bus set out into the desert night. Earlier my mother had noticed that one of the rear tires of the bus was in questionable condition. In retrospect it was down right hazardous to travel on the tin happy meal. The thug driver at the time only laughed as if we were about to join him at the Russian roulette table and said the bastard wheel was fine, we will move like wind. To me the tire looked to have been knawed by a group of fractious piranha or hacked with a jungle spear. The bus was soon flying brakeless through the night, we said our prayers. Our destination was east to the Yucatan Peninsula. Warm sweet air hit our faces from a lone open window up front and pretty soon we all drifted off to sleep clutching our valuables. Everyone on the bus was jolted awake as the lunatic pulled over onto the shoulder of the road. It was around 3 am and we were in the middle of the thick jungle. Nothing was visible but inky blackness. The mad man was calling in a frantic maydey, "we've broke down and there are Americans on board." We were in northern Chiapas and it was during the time of revolution. The federal government was at war with the EZLN, the Zapatista National Liberation Army, better known as Zapatistas. The Zapatista guerillas were Tzotzil Indians and Tzeltal Mayans. These rebels were working out of jungle strongholds, cut off economically and politically by the Mexican government. We were sitting ducks. The bus driver radioed again for a "maydey," advising again that the bus was broken down and vulnerable and that he had American tourists on board. My aunt overheard passengers in the rear of the bus speaking about Americans being slaughtered and buried in shallow graves. It was quite a precarious situation. The air was tense, the mood restless. I could hear excitment in the peons' voices reminiscent of the spectators awaiting bloody conquests of Ullamaliztli. It seemed like forever before the Mexican Special Foreces arrived armed with AK-47's, Uzis, more grenades than I could count and all wearing dark green bandanas and camouflage fatigues. They surrounded the bus, weapons at the ready while the blown tire was replaced. I figure it was minutes before the bus was overrun by rebels and God only knows what would have become of us. Eventually the bus began rolling again. By morning we were in Merida in the heart of the Yucatan, the land of habanero pepper plantations.

CHAPTER 8: HISTORY AND AGRICULTURE OF THE HABANERO

Very little concrete evidence is known about the origins of the habanero pepper. Some believe it originated in Cuba, the name habanero in Spanish means "from Havana," though the pepper was most likely not originally from Cuba and today is not found in Cuba.

            Barbara Pickersgill PhD, a British botanist, who studies the evolutionary biology of Capsicum, stated that a small habanero was found in Pre-ceramic levels in Guitarrero Cave in Peru, dated 6500 B.C., the pepper thus has been in existence for at least 85 centuries.  Barbara says that since most species of C. Chinense grow wild in South America, that they most likely originated in South America and made their way to Central America and the Caribbean.

            Whole Chile Pepper Magazine wrote in the1989 July issue that the habanero pepper is the only pepper grown in the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico that doesn't have a Mayan name.  That is interesting and possible evidence that the pepper was imported to Mexico from elsewhere.

            Others believe it originated in the Amazon basin or nearby coastal regions in Mesoamerica or South America (http://en.academic.ru/dic.nsf/enwiki/135231).

            Richard S. MacNeish, an American archaeologist, in his 1964 work titled, Ancient Mesoamerican civilization, claims people were consuming hot peppers as long ago as 7, 500 B.C.

            Dr. Bosland stated in his book, Capsicums: Innovative uses of an ancient crop, a French taxonomist in 1776 orignally mistook the habanero for originating in China, where he attained one of the seeds which is why it is still called today, Capsicum Chinense, meaning the Chinese pepper (Smith and Heiser 1957).

            Seeds were found from a Black Habanero (which is the dark brown colored pepper) that were possibly as old as 7,000 years.  This pepper supposedly has a very unusual flavor and when cooking with it requires using small amounts because of its pungent, different flavor. 

            About 1,500 tons of habaneros are harvested in the Yucatan Peninsula every year.  They are also
grown in Costa Rica, Belize, Texas and California but not to the same extent.

An ancient Greek named Theophrastus (371-287 B.C.) wrote numerous books and a couple on the study of botany.  His two most important works are Enquiry into Plants, and On the Causes of Plants.  He mentioned capsicum, and I am only mentioning this because I find the knowledge of the ancient Greeks fascinating.

            Explorer Christopher Columbus came upon chili peppers in the Caribbean and named them red peppers, believing he arrived in India, after the old world black pepper in the Piper genus, which by the way, is not related to the Capsicum.  Physician Diego Alvarez Chanca sailed on Columbus' second voyage to the West Indies in 1493.  He collected chili peppers and returned them to Spain.  In 1494 he stated that they had medicinal properties, wrote Joy Schantz from the Pheniox Historic Destinations Examiner. 

            I think that when it comes to history, the origin of things, and life at various extreme increments of time we are naive.  I think the habanero pepper or an ancestor of the pepper, like the giant palm trees of Easter Island, now extinct, has existed for 50,000 or more years, possibly even 20 million years.  Why do I believe this?  Because of the nature of life, the divine mathematics that, for example, the engineers of the Great Pyramid discovered, and Luca Pacioli taught to Leonardo Da Vinci and other superior intellectuals.  It is that same principle that Mozart used to create the Requiem.  The growth of a plant, like the habanero, and Fibonacci numbers, and its relation to the golden ratio, how the pepper will grow to two inches long and one inch wide, three inches long, two inches wide; its leaves five inches long, three inches wide.  If either the pepper or the leaves continued to growth larger they would gradually get closer and closer to the golden ratio.  Life corresponds to a cyclical phenomena that is ever present everywhere from the swirling of smoke off the cherry of a cigar, to the orbiting planets, to the birth, life and death of living organisms, to every rotating horizon on every known and unknown planet, to the seeds of the habanero plant.  Why is this so?  Because of divine mathematics and simply what was and is and therefore will always be until it is destroyed and forced once again to recreate.  Someday science will be able to, metaphorically speaking, extract from the rings of trees, images of times past.  But by then most of the natural trees will have been destroyed and, like the burned books of the Mayans, we will regret our human instinct to destroy, outweighing the highly intelligent few who long to preserve.  I'm sure there are many books, from many ancient civilizations dating back hundreds of thousands of years that have simply turned to dust over time, been destroyed, or are waiting to be found and will speak of the fiery habanero pepper, rewriting the history books.  Maybe our civilization is still too young to accurately understand that what we know about the past is only the thin layer of something far more complex that hasn't yet been discovered.  The theories and questions are endless.  The mystery of the origin of the habanero pepper lives on.