If you believe, as I do, that all of life is a part of some great cosmic recycling center, welcome home to New Mexico—a place where using and reusing is just what we do here. We patch, we re-plaster, we remodel and then remodel again, we scrimp, we save, save, save, but mostly we use things until they can be used no more, and then we find another way to use them. Curbside recycling comes very late to this party of reuse. In the days of yore, there would be nothing that would have made its way into the bin, so complete was the use of all spare materials.

Any survey of early tools in New Mexico demonstrates how this process worked. Tools, especially iron tools, were used until they broke and then patched and used again until the iron had been whittled down. Hardware was sometimes not hard at all since hinging might be accomplished by fitting extensions of the door or shutter’s wood stile into holes in wood sills and lintels, thereby creating puncheon doors and shutters, and thus avoiding the need for precious and rare metal. A doorknob was unheard of since a simple deep notch in the door’s surface would do the trick, at least on one side. Farm tools made entirely of wood, such as hoes, rakes, pitchforks, and harrows, like the elements of the puncheon doors and windows, have rarely survived, having been smoothed into oblivion and then added to the fire as the final act of annihilation.

 

Besides returning objects to their atomic level of existence through decades or centuries of use, New Mexicans eagerly snapped up other people’s discards when they first became available in the 19th century. This might explain why flea markets and garage sales are among our favorite weekend activities—perhaps there is a genetic component in addition to the deeply entrenched cultural one? In any case, when the first empty tin lard container hit the U.S. Army dump, it probably barely touched the earth before it was scooped up by a triumphant, first generation recycler. In a region where each nail was accounted for, the extravagance of a discarded metal container was a new and wonderful thing. Nothing reveals the beauty and ingenuity of reusing materials, as practiced by New Mexicans, as much as the reuse of that most humble material, tin.

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