As far back as I can remember, Pecos cantaloupe was a family affair.
Growing up, my siblings and I spent part of the summer with our grandparents in El Paso. The halcyon desert days would end when we piled in the car for the ten-hour drive home to Fort Worth. As we made our way eastward, we’d detour off the interstate in Pecos, my grandfather’s hometown. After driving around streets as bare as the surrounding Permian Basin, we’d manage to find a grower selling cantaloupe out of the bed of his truck. For a few minutes, my grandfather would get out of the car, talk to the grower, and deposit a box of the region’s fruit in the trunk. When we got home, my siblings and I would crowd the still-dusty melons, smelling the fragrant nub of the stems, as we waited for our mother to cut one in half, scoop out the seeds, and slice the orange fruit form the rind. After that summer could only go downhill.
That was the better part of a lifetime ago. Over the past two decades, the detours off Interstate 20 and anticipation around a box of Pecos cantaloupes have gone from annual delights to cherished memories.
The gradual loss of my family’s summer ritual has been long in the making. Across Texas, cultivation of cantaloupe has decreased. Before 2002, Texas farmers grew more than 10,000 acres of cantaloupe. Two decades later, that figure had fallen to about 2,000 harvested acres, the lowest levels in the state since the 1920s. The glory days of the Pecos cantaloupe, Texas’s most famous melon, have passed.
The causes are manifold. Population declines in rural Reeves County (its county seat is Pecos, population 12,916) and Pecos County (population 15,193) have accompanied a downturn in agricultural production, while at the same time, the oil and gas boom in the Permian Basin has strained the local agriculture industry as a whole. There is far more money to be made in the gas industry than in cantaloupe. There are enduring reasons for the decline of Pecos cantaloupe as well. Beto Mandujano, co-owner of Mandujano Brothers Produce, based in Pecos County, puts the matter simply: “It’s a tough plant to grow in Texas.”
Cantaloupe traces its origins to the food revolution that accompanied the eighth-century Islamic conquest of southern Spain. In the ensuing centuries, cantaloupe took hold in the warm and dry Mediterranean climate of Spain, southern France, and Italy. Such was the popularity of cantaloupe in southern Europe that Columbus brought the fruit on his second voyage to Hispaniola, in 1493.
In the sunny climes of the Americas, cantaloupe proliferated. By the time expeditions crossed the Rio Grande to establish missions in northern New Spain in the early eighteenth century, cantaloupe had established itself as a New World success story. It would be one of the first nonnative fruits grown in Texas.
Today cantaloupe grows throughout the United States (California, far and away, grows the most), but there is something ideal in the dry skies, loamy desert soils, and 2,500-foot elevation in the northern corner of Pecos County, between the towns of Pecos and Coyanosa (population 155). The conditions conspire to produce a cantaloupe so sweet, juicy, and silky, that by the 1910s Pecos cantaloupe had become a regional sensation.
Madison L. Todd made Pecos cantaloupe popular. Arriving in Pecos from New Mexico in 1916, Todd followed a local trend in growing cantaloupe outside of town. Where Todd stood out in the scene was in sales. His primary customer was the dining car on the Texas and Pacific Railway (T&P), which served Todd’s Pecos cantaloupe for breakfast. Mail orders followed on the heels of the profitable T&P contract—just in time for the possibility of radio advertisements. As Pecos cantaloupe took off, farmers in Reeves and Pecos counties expanded cantaloupe cultivation with the newfound knowledge that local atmospheric and soil conditions could produce a fruit that many customers wanted to eat. By 1930, Texans were growing 3,580 acres of cantaloupe.
In midcentury Pecos, cantaloupe grounded local identity. An annual Cantaloupe Festival inaugurated the early summer harvest of the region’s beloved fruit (the last was held in 2022). The Pecos Chamber of Commerce promoted its youth beauty pageant as “Little Miss Cantaloupe”—which is perhaps the world’s only beauty pageant named after the melon and which continues to this day. Today’s Pecos participates in the oil boom of the Permian Basin that shows no signs of slowing down.
Growing a humble melon hardly produces riches. Indeed, the story of Pecos cantaloupe prevailing over the region’s economic and historical trends is in some ways more surprising than its decline. The toil and luck that go into preserving Pecos cantaloupe against the zeitgeist approximates the mythical. Today, Mandujano Brothers Produce, growing cantaloupe along with watermelon and other fruits and vegetables on farms around Coyanosa, is one of the last major growers of Pecos cantaloupe. If you find Pecos cantaloupe at H-E-B, it was grown at Mandujano Brothers.
For the six weeks or so of the cantaloupe harvest in Pecos County, from late June to early August, not a day goes by without the Mandujano Brothers’ multigenerational crew of migrant workers scouring the fields and pulling ripe cantaloupe from the vine. The amount of fruit the Mandujano Brothers harvest from 280 acres of planted cantaloupe demands a large-scale operation. “Today we shipped out three loads of cantaloupe,” Beto Mandujano tells me, “which is about 3,600 boxes.” (Each box contains six to fifteen cantaloupes, depending on their size.) “Yesterday,” he continues, “we shipped out seven loads . . . about 7,000 boxes.” This is a lot of fruit: between 32,400 and 63,000 individual cantaloupes shipped to the warehouses each day, hundreds of pounds of cantaloupe handled by employees each working day, beginning at 6:30 on a West Texas summer morning—and all this before the employees begin harvesting watermelon.
The cantaloupe harvest demands time and labor during the hottest part of the year. As the cost of labor and the bureaucratic obstacles to family businesses obtaining work visas have increased, cantaloupe has become less and less desirable in the Pecos region. The changing economic circumstances of the Permian Basin have left behind the orange-tinted vision of Madison L. Todd. As the last major grower of the storied cantaloupe, the Mandujano Brothers put in insuperable time and exertion out of a sense of commitment. “As long as our customers and suppliers want it,” Mandujano says, “we’ll grow it.” That desire does not appear to be abating. “We get asked to ship cantaloupe to Montana,” Mandujano explains. “My wife has started shipping to people who can’t get the cantaloupe but grew up with it and want it.”
The tenacity of Pecos cantaloupe is not just a matter of the (undeniably peerless) gustatory pleasure of such a lovely fruit. For a fruit that grows at a size small enough for a child to hold and large enough to share with the family, Pecos cantaloupe taps into the wellspring of memory. Years after my mother sliced the last cantaloupe that my grandfather bought on the August streets of Pecos, she wrote a poem on her own childhood summers where “real Pecos cantaloupes” made “perfect ice cream bowls.”
I could be wrong
but in my memory, the days
and weeks and summers themselves
were as sweet and ripe
and irreplaceable as clothes sewn
by hand and bags full of Pecos cantaloupes.
