It was a week of hard phone calls for Yvonne Sanchez.
As the president of the Valencia County Hispano Chamber of Commerce, she had the task of telling friends, family and local business people that the chamber’s 12th annual matanza, scheduled for Jan. 28, had been canceled.
Sanchez said the U.S. Department of Agriculture had determined that the pork used at the matanza must be butchered and packaged at a department-certified facility – a request she says relegates the long-standing tradition to nothing more than a backyard barbecue.
“If we are going to do that, we might as well walk across the street and buy our meat at Walmart,” Sanchez said.
The requirement for USDA-certified pork seems to be triggered by the fact there is an admission fee to the event, Sanchez said.
“But we aren’t charging for the food. People pay to come see a cultural event,” she said, referring to the process of cleaning and gutting the hog carcasses, butchering them and then cooking the meat, which is performed every year in plain view of the matanza attendees.
Shortly before Thanksgiving, Sanchez and other board members met with Robert Leskowsky, compliance investigator for the USDA western region.
Sanchez said Leskowsky indicated the matanza, as explained to him, did not meet the criteria to operate under the Federal Meat Custom Exemption regulations, which under certain conditions allow for the slaughter of animals by someone other than a USDA-certified butcher.
“Basically, it comes down to a difference of interpretation of the exemptions – we feel we fall under them and they don’t,” Sanchez said. “Mr. Leskowsky told us if we went forward with the event, he would red tag it and confiscate the carcasses.
“We are looking at every option we have to get back on track for 2013 and keep with our traditional methods,” she said. “We are sure we can find a way to work with USDA that meets their regulations and at the same time doesn’t cause a loss of our culture and tradition. Maybe they can learn from us.”
Calls to the USDA were not returned.
In 2004, the New Mexico Environment Department’s Environmental Health Division approached the chamber with some concerns.
“We sat down with them and developed a good system,” Sanchez said. “From 2005 on, they were involved.”
The department sent five inspectors to be on site for the entire event and each team participated in a food safety and handling class before the matanza.
The chamber’s board made the announcement the day after Christmas.
— This article appeared on page A1 of the Albuquerque Journal
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6:55am 1/3/12 — Chamber Says USDA Puts Kibosh on Matanza
Journal Staff Report
“We’ve canceled our 12th annual Matanza,” Valencia County Hispano Chamber of Commerce spokesman Edward Calabaza told KOB Eyewitness News 4 on Monday.
Calabaza told KOB-TV that because there’s a charge to get into the annual pig roast, the U.S. Department of Agriculture is imposing meat restrictions requiring event organizers to send the animals to a USDA-certified processing plant.
“That is not a traditional Matanza,” Calabaza said. At a traditional Matanza, hogs are processed and cooked on site, not at a plant.
The Matanza was to have taken place at the Valencia County Sheriff’s Posse Fairgrounds on Jan. 28, KOB-TV said.
According to an editorial in the Valencia County News-Bulletin titled “A tradition worth saving,” the annual fundraising event “has been a great asset not only to the community, but to our culture.”
The USDA claims the event is a violation of the Federal Meat Inspection Act, and if participants were to use packaged meat or use a USDA-certified facility to slaughter the pigs, the Matanza could go on, the News-Bulletin editorial said.
The chamber reluctantly called off this year’s event because it was “unwilling to jeopardize the event, the teams who compete and members of the community who attend the Matanza every year,” the editorial said.
“We, and probably the majority of our readers, are very disappointed” at the cancellation, and added: “we are more frustrated that the USDA doesn’t understand what they are doing is more than shutting down an event they believe to be a violation of the federal act,” the News-Bulletin said.
“It’s actually eliminating a tradition that we here in Valencia County, in New Mexico, have been doing for hundreds of years,” the editorial said. “Matanzas are part of our culture, our heritage.”
