Fabiola Cabeza de Baca Gilbert

Fabiola Cabeza de Baca in front of a rural school in New Mexico, circa 1920s. Fabiola Cabeza de Baca Gilbert (May 16, 1894 – October 14, 1991) was an American educator, nutritionist, activist and writer. She was also the first known published author of a cookbook describing New Mexican cuisine. Cabeza de Baca was fluent in Spanish, English, Tewa and Tiwa.

Biography Cabeza de Baca was part of a prominent New Mexican family and one of four siblings. She was also related to the second Governor of New Mexico, Ezequiel Cabeza de Baca, who was her uncle. Her mother died when she was four, and her paternal grandmother raised her afterwards. As a young woman, Cabeza de Baca "refused to take on her 'proper' role as a Spanish lady" and spent her time riding horses and watching the ranch men work. When she was twelve, she visited Spain.

Cabeza de Baca first attended a Catholic school, where she was expelled from Loreto Academy's kindergarten for slapping a nun. In this capacity, she taught rural women modern agricultural techniques, introduced modern devices like sewing machines, so that rural families could thrive on their own land. She also helped organize clubs for rural women. Canning was one of the methods that extension agents tried to spread to rural areas, however, in rural New Mexico this was a controversial topic because most farm women had no running water and few could afford a pressure cooker. Instead, these women relied on a long tradition of drying food to preserve it. The extension service also endorsed this practice. She was the first extension agent who spoke Spanish and often translated government information into Spanish for rural residents. The book sold over 100,000 copies, and was republished many times.

Cabeza de Baca's second cookbook, The Good Life: New Mexico Traditions and Foods was first published in 1949 and was one of the first cookbooks to "place recipes within the historic and cultural contexts out of which they grew." The book contained a fictional family, the Turrieta family, which represented the people that she met as an extension agent.

Her autobiographical narrative, We Fed Them Cactus (1954), describes the life of New Mexican Hispanos, and documents four generations of her family. The title refers to a major drought that caused her family to have to feed cactus to their cattle. The story is narrated by El Cuate, or the camp cook, and the narrative in We Fed Them Cactus is meant to "counter Anglo-American stereotyping of wealthy and corrupt landowners of the rico class."

Between 1958 and 1961 she wrote and edited for a magazine she helped found, the Santa Fe Scene.

Later Chicano readings of Cabeza de Baca's work were critical of her writing, which was seen as "elitist and not representative of the realistic Chicano experience." Despite this criticism, her writing has been viewed by Hispanic literary critics as a precursor to Chicana literature.

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