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The rush begins at midday, heralded by an unseen rooster crowing the noon hour.

Of the dozen or so tables in El Mexicano Café, only four have customers. Two mainly are filled by men in jeans, plain cotton shirts and sweat-ringed hats. A couple of young mothers with infants in strollers talk animatedly at a third table. I'm alone at the fourth, the only non-Latino and an obvious out-of-towner.

So much for the lunch crush.

This is the measured pulse of life about 80 miles north of where the Rio Grande slices eastward to form the Texas-Mexico border. But come Labor Day weekend, the pace will quicken as about 30,000 people descend on Hatch (population 1,660) to celebrate the town's best-known commodity — red and green chile peppers.

What began 35 years ago as a one-day local harvest celebration has blossomed into the two-day Hatch Chile Festival, drawing chile lovers from as far away as East Texas and Southern California.

Equal parts country fair and kitsch, the fiesta includes what Mayor Judd Nordyke describes as "dumb things" like chile-tossing and eating contests as well as country and Latin music, the crowning of a chile queen and, of course, vendors selling chile-themed doodads. The red chile ristra is the local answer to the Hawaiian lei, and purists can buy freshly dried chiles by the bag or pick up a gas-fired barrel roaster for the patio.

The party has become too big for Hatch itself, so it's held beyond a low hill just north of town that hides the local landing strip. (The airport is still open; pilots are warned to watch out for parked cars.) There's now a cooking contest and an array of booths, but the festival initially served up a single plate from the school cafeteria — chiles rellenos, red and green enchiladas, rice, beans and tortillas.

"For years, there was no other food there," Nordyke said. "It's kind of lost the flavor of the old country fair."

Maybe, but the trade-off put Hatch on the map. The festival has been featured on the Food Network, national TV news shows and magazines targeting food aficionados, many of whom believe the local soil content, climate and summer heat give Hatch chiles a distinctive balance of heat and flavor.

If there is a bad plate with chile sauce to be had here, it missed me. The green sauce over carnitas enchiladas at El Mexicano had enough heat to raise a sweat but enough richness to make you not care. During the next four days, I ate chile sauce up and down this stretch of the Rio Grande, and each was as good as the last.

Truth be told, there isn't much to Hatch beyond the Chile Festival, reflecting the town's role as a service center for the farms that make the Rio Grande an improbably verdant ribbon of life meandering through the northern Chihuahuan Desert. But there are rewards for the patient and curious.

Las Cruces, my base, is about 45 minutes south of Hatch along Interstate 25 or about an hour following New Mexico 185, the preferred route. Where the freeway keeps an aloof distance east of the river, 185 follows the Rio Grande in an intimate tango, dancing cheek to cheek for a few miles before twirling apart, only to come back together for a kiss. The land shifts from green farmland in the flatlands to narrow passes through hills eroded down to the rock, as though the Earth's bones were showing.

Midway between Hatch and Las Cruces lies Ft. Selden, a former home to the famous Buffalo Soldiers. The fort has crumbled to ruins, but a state-run information center has displays on life at the fort and its role in protecting settlers from Apache raiding parties as the U.S. government wrestled the West into submission in the decades after the Civil War.

The mountains and La Mesilla

IN Las Cruces, West Picacho Avenue holds a strip of antiques shops, including the Glen, a vintage clothing and costume store, a far-removed slice of Manhattan's campy East Village. But most of Las Cruces has been colonized by chain restaurants and local services that define so much of American architecture. The "anywhere" feel of the city contrasts sharply with two nearby gems: the Organ Mountains rising to the east and the old Mexican trading post of La Mesilla.