04/28/2026
Xoxoctic: Journey of Spectral Flame
Xoxoctic, green in the language of our ancestors.
We offered sacred chile to gods who understood the burn.
Carried from milpas to stone pyramids.
Smoke as prayer, labor as offering.
That flame did not disappear.
It was carried.
Mexican hands, our abuelos,
bearing seeds across borders that did not yet exist,
planting them along the Río Grande
long before lines were drawn to deny them.
The fruit took root.
Gemstones of deep jade.
Now in Hatch, Socorro, Lemitar, Burque,
names layered over older memory,
still grown on the backs of those
this country pretends not to see.
A state builds its identity on this labor.
Federal power attempts to deport the hands that feed it.
Laws are written against the bodies that sustain it.
You taste it every day.
In a Blake’s Lotaburger New Mexico Style.
Green chile pepperoni. Piñon brittle.
In the smoke that fills parking lots each September
like a ritual.
You call it local.
We call it memory.
Because that heat,
that burn,
is not just flavor.
It is inheritance.
It is communion with the gods.
Our spectral past does not fade.
It lingers in the fields,
in the kitchens,
in the hands still harvesting under the same sun.
