Hatch Chile Festival

The chile roasters in Hatch run all day on Labor Day weekend, and the heat off them makes the late-summer afternoon harder to escape. Farmers and vendors fire them along the streets that spread out from the corner of Franklin and Hall, the center of the Hatch Chile Festival. They sell the valley’s green chile by the sack, roasted on the spot or raw to carry home. Pattern Energy, writing ahead of the 2023 festival, gave the usual sack as forty pounds and noted that experienced buyers bag and freeze theirs for the year. Farmers Chile Market, an Albuquerque roaster, expected a roasted sack to cost about $40 in 2026, with smaller amounts also for sale.

The festival falls early for fresh red chile, by that roaster’s account, but the ristras are already hanging. Visitors find long straight strings of sandia chile, chile wreaths, ristras of small pequin and yellow guerito, and ristras of garlic and onions. People tie them at stands throughout the village and, when business allows, will show a visitor how. Classes in ristra tying are held in the pecan orchard at Hatch Valley High School.

Roasters on Franklin and Hall

Hatch is a village in Doña Ana County, just off Interstate 25 about 40 miles northwest of Las Cruces. The 2020 census counted 1,539 people. Drivers leave the interstate at Exit 41 and follow NM 26 west into town. The Farmers Chile Market guide offers a landmark: at the water tower, head east for the festival or west for the fields. Most years visitors have parked free at the high school, though the guide warns a charge may come. From there it is a walk southwest to downtown, and a shuttle bus stops on Franklin Street in front of the orchard. The whole town can be crossed on foot in about half an hour. The gazebo in the park offers shade, as does the air conditioning of a grocery or café. The Hatch Fire Department brings out its trucks and shows children how they work.

At Sparky’s, on the biggest intersection in town, the line for green chile cheeseburgers runs around the block during festival weekend. B & E Burritos sells food to eat walking. Pepper Pot seats diners for plates such as stacked red chile enchiladas. Across from Sparky’s, Icebox Brewing pours beers made for the festival, one served with a rim of chile powder, and a stage beside it often carries live music until about 10 p.m.

The music starts before the festival proper. In 2023, by Pattern Energy’s account, bands began at the brewery at 4 p.m. Friday. Farmers Chile Market says the carnival opens Friday evening too, with rides and games behind Village Market on School Street. Vendors with snacks and refrescos stand all along the way. The 2025 list ran from FFA watermelon slices and Mi Abuelita’s Biscochitos to Native Flutes, The Crazy Hat Lady, and the Chile Pepper Institute of New Mexico State University.

Some festivalgoers come dressed as chile peppers. Others wear hats made to look like ristras or roasters, and chile fashion is judged most years. Visitors hunting extreme heat are warned off by the Albuquerque roaster. Its Lumbre, which it calls arguably the hottest chile New Mexico grows in quantity, ranges around 10,000 Scoville, less than one percent of a Carolina Reaper. The festival, its guide says, “isn’t about that.”

Two stages in the pecan orchard

The 2026 festival was held Saturday, September 5, and Sunday, September 6. Farmers Chile Market counted it as the 54th, one year having been cancelled for covid. The parade stepped off at 9 a.m. Saturday on the Franklin and Hall route. The two stages stood in the high school’s pecan orchard.

On the main stage, opening ceremonies came at 11 a.m. The 1st Armored Division Band played from 11:15 to 2:15, followed by Chris Baker. Tudy Romero & The Silver Bullet Band played until 7:30 in the evening. The second stage had the Hatch Little Cheer Team and an elementary ballet folklorico at 11:30, and author Rachel Bates and other writers read at noon. From 1:00 to 3:00 came the eating contests, in watermelon, chile, and ice cream, with free entry. A live auction followed.

Sunday opened with ballet folklorico at 11 a.m. Mariachis played until 12:30, and the dancers returned after them. Mood Swing and the Suthern Blend Band carried the main stage to 6:30. The second stage held a friendship-bracelet craft, a second round of eating contests, book readings, and a hat-decorating session from 3:00 to 5:00.

Away from the stages, themed rocks were hidden around town, to be turned in at the festival booth for a prize. A selfie contest paid $100 for the best picture taken beside what the festival calls “all the icons of Hatch,” with judging at 4:30. The program shifts from year to year. In 2023, Pattern Energy reported, the eating contests came at 2 p.m. Saturday and were followed by a Chile Queen Auction.

A homestead in Salem

New Mexican farmers first settled the place in 1851, on the road between the Jornada del Muerto and Cooke’s Wagon Road, until Apache raids drove them out. Fort Thorn, built in 1853, brought them back. The fort closed in 1859, and the settlement was abandoned again in 1860. When the area was reoccupied in 1875, it took the name of Edward Hatch, then of the military District of New Mexico.

In 1917 Joseph and Celestina Franzoy, Austrian immigrants, took up a homestead in Salem, just outside Hatch. New Mexico Magazine told their story in 2018. They spent the first summer in a tent with seven children, then built an adobe house with dirt floors. Marsh and brush covered much of their 60 acres. Small farms in the valley grew cotton and wheat and sold the cotton to local gins, and neighbors laughed when Joseph planted vegetables. Nobody in the region hauled and sold produce on their own, so he took his crops to the buyers. The door-to-door trips by wagon took 16 hours. Later the family loaded a wagon in the afternoon and left at 3 a.m. to meet the 8 a.m. train in Hatch, bound for Fort Bayard near Silver City.

By family legend, the Franzoys thought they were being poisoned the first time they tasted the green chile their neighbors ate. Joseph came to love it and saved the seed. Families in the valley grew chile for themselves, but none cultivated and marketed it beyond the valley until he did. That made him the first commercial chile farmer in the Hatch Valley. He bought farms for his four daughters and six sons, who gave him 36 grandchildren.

Fifteen hundred in 1971

The festival’s beginnings are told two ways. New Mexico Magazine says a group of businessmen, among them Franzoy farmers, started it in 1971 to promote chile grown in “the perfect combination of high altitude, salty earth, and cool nights.” The festival’s own account calls the first one a modest gathering of local farmers celebrating the harvest, and Farmers Chile Market says it began with just a few local growers. About 1,500 people came that first year. Chile was little known outside the Southwest then. As Southwestern cooking spread across the country, attendance passed 30,000.

Valley farmers learned to grind chile into powders for grocery stores, sell to canneries, and ship semi loads of fresh pods across the country. New Mexico State University agronomists helped them develop 130 varieties. One was the Big Jim. A newer one, Miss Junie, was named for Joseph’s youngest daughter, who turned 92 in August 2018. The festival now names its sponsor tiers for both. In 2012 state legislators barred the sale in New Mexico of chile called “New Mexican” unless it was grown in the state or carried a prominent “Not grown in New Mexico” label. The next year a group of Hatch Valley growers formed a nonprofit and filed for a federal certification mark.

The harvest still comes just ahead of the festival. Green chile is ready to pick in August, and each pod is pulled from its stem by hand. Barbara Mitchell, a Franzoy descendant, remembers crews hunched over the rows all day. When rain kept the trailer out of the field, they carried forty-pound sacks half a mile to the end of the row. Her mother, Judy Berridge, one of Joseph Franzoy’s grandchildren, has known only farm life in the valley. “It was a wonderful way of life,” she told the magazine. “Never had any money, but we always ate well.”