Growing up in Chicago’s southside, where the most accessible farming options were planters on a windowsill or back porch, Shahid Mustafa never imagined growing food for himself or others. He also never envisioned himself carrying on a little-known legacy of Black farmers in southern New Mexico.
It took three tries before a job recruiter successfully got Mustafa on a flight to El Paso. The Southwest was unknown territory to him and he’d never even heard of Las Cruces, home to an organic grocery store that wanted to hire him as its manager.
The plane flew over the Borderland after dark, revealing nothing of the landscape below but twinkling city lights. That night Mustafa slept in a bed and breakfast in Mesilla, New Mexico.
“When I woke up in the morning, all I could see were the mountains, and it was so overwhelming, so amazing, that I was almost late for the interview,” he said. “I started walking, thinking, ‘I’m going to walk to the mountains.’ I had no idea how far they were. I had to turn around.”
That view stirred an inexplicable feeling within Mustafa that urged him to stay. He made it to his interview on time and soon after accepted the manager position at Mountain View Market Co+op in Las Cruces. That was 2006. The grocery store has since closed, but Mustafa remains. He now works as a full-time independent farmer, leasing a one-acre plot in La Union.
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A city kid visits the family farm
Becoming a farmer reconnected Mustafa with a family tradition that had skipped two generations. His maternal great-great and great grandfathers once farmed in the South. As a kid, Mustafa would visit his great-grandfather in rural Arkansas. The small family farm was located 50 miles west of the Mississippi River in Clarendon, a town once known for its freshwater pearls.
“I remember as a kid, I couldn’t get lost in that town. All I had to do was mention who my grandfather was, and everybody knew exactly where he lived and how I could get back home,” Mustafa said.
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Most prominent in Mustafa’s memory is his great-grandfather’s peach orchard. He would pick up peaches that had fallen from the trees and immediately take a bite, ignoring his great-grandmother’s warning to first bring the fruit inside so it could be sliced and inspected.
“I remember once I took a bite out of a peach and saw half of a worm,” he said. “The rest of the worm was halfway down my stomach. I just looked up and tried to spit it out. And I could hear my grandmother in the back porch laughing.”
Mustafa jokes that was his first “taste” of organic farming.
His next most memorable encounter wouldn’t come until he was in college. Mustafa studied journalism at Howard University, but worked at a health food store to pay his bills. He stocked vegetables under a produce manager who was also a part-time farmer.
“She was very meticulous about how we needed to respect what we were handling,” he said. “That was probably my initial inspiration into what I do now.”
Mustafa has farmed in Socorro, Texas and Las Cruces, but relocated a few months ago to La Union. The plot he leases is just 14 miles south of Vado, where Black settlers established a community in the early 20th century.
Black homesteaders arrive in New Mexico
New Mexico was a destination for Black settlers before it even became a state. One group arrived south of Roswell around 1903 and started a townsite called Blackdom. The settlers acquired hundreds of acres of land through various iterations of the 1865 Homestead Act.
Census reports show Blackdom residents worked as farmers and ranchers, nurses, real estate agents, lenders and letter carriers. Some even leased mineral rights in an oil company they started. The settlers came from all over, including Texas, Kentucky, Virginia, Iowa and Illinois.
Rita Powdrell, director of the African American Museum and Cultural Center in Albuquerque, said many came to escape racist laws and attacks, particularly in the South.
“You have people who are trying to redefine who they are … to find places of sanctuary,” she said. “You got the Ku Klux Klan and the Red Shirts. People are being intimidated, people are being lynched and people are seeing the West as having a sense of hope.”
The stories of a handful of families who homesteaded in New Mexico is currently on exhibit at the Albuquerque Museum. Among the founders of Blackdom were Frank and Ella Boyer, university-educated teachers from Georgia who came seeking new opportunities for their families. In the 1920s, the Boyers moved farther west and helped establish another largely Black community in Vado, New Mexico.
Bobbie Jean Fuller Boyer, 82, lives on 20 acres of now-retired Boyer farmland that once sprouted cotton and alfalfa. Her husband’s grandparents were Frank and Ella Boyer. She was born and raised in Vado herself and worked as a bookkeeper for Gadson Independent School District. Her late husband, Roosevelt Boyer Jr., was an electrical engineer for Hewlett Packard. Both attended the segregated Black school in Vado, which is now the town’s community center and is listed in the National Register of Historic Places.
“Almost everybody here got a high school education and a lot of them went on to college,” she said.
John Holguin, 73, also a life-long Vado resident, grew up riding bikes and eating bologna sandwiches with the Boyer kids. Holguin’s grandparents also came to New Mexico seeking refuge, only they came from Mexico after the Mexican revolution. He believes similar histories of hardship and discrimination created an unspoken kinship between Vado’s Black and Hispanic families.
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Holguin, a retired New Mexico state police officer, said he was inspired to work in law enforcement by a local Black constable named Lester Brady. Holguin remembers his father and Constable Brady talking all night after sharing a barbecue dinner every year on Juneteenth.
“When we were growing up, it was mostly a Black community,” Holguin said. “We all grew up together. We didn’t know anything about racism or discrimination. Everybody got along very well.”
Taylor Hood Farms connecting to the ‘ancestral community’
When Mustafa decided to move to New Mexico, he had no clue about the region’s Black farming history.
“I’ve run into a couple of Black cowboys in the area who told me, ‘Yeah, we grew up here. This is what we’ve been doing.’ I was just fascinated by that,” Mustafa said. “I began to wonder, ‘Why hasn’t this been a more major part of the history of this community?”
Mustafa hasn’t found a specific answer to that question. The stories of minorities and marginalized Americans have been historically undertold across the U.S. The Washington Post reports that Black farmers have lost 90% of farmland they owned over the last century because of discriminatory practices by the U.S. government and others.
In New Mexico, 82% of agricultural land is owned or operated by white farmers, according to the latest agricultural census in 2017. Fifty farms in the state are run by Blacks with the majority of their plots being less than 10 acres in size.
Most of the descendants of New Mexico’s Black homesteaders have left farming for other professions. The diminished interest in farming among younger generations has created a welcoming atmosphere for Mustafa.
“A lot of farmers are older people who are just happy to see that somebody is carrying on this legacy,” Mustafa said. “They share a lot of information and try to help out.”
In a nod to his ancestors, Mustafa named his venture Taylor Hood Farms, after the surnames of his great- and great-great-grandfathers. He sells his harvest to individual subscribers mostly in Las Cruces and El Paso, who receive a box of farm-fresh produce delivered by him once a week. What he grows varies; this month he plans to plant greens and root vegetables.
Mustafa thinks of his farm as not just a business, but a way to give back to the earth and the community. He practices a form a farming known as regenerative agriculture which, among other things, aims to capture excess carbon in the atmosphere with vegetation that sinks that carbon into the ground where it can be beneficial to the soil.
“It’s my opinion that we can do more for the environment on small-scale operations like this than expect these giant thousand-acre farms to convert … because there’s very little incentive for them,” he said.
Mustafa also runs a non-profit called DYGUP/Sustain that teaches youth and adults about small-scale agriculture. Through the non-profit, he helped start a community garden across the street from Las Cruces High School.
His arrival in New Mexico prompted him to not only plant roots in the land, but also reconnect with his own ancestral roots.
“I believe in fate. I connected to the ancestral community here spiritually,” he said. “I still feel that connection here with the Earth and with the environment.”
Mónica Ortiz Uribe can be reached at monica.ortiz@elpasotimes.com
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