The Spanish Redemption: Heritage, Power, and Loss on New Mexico's Upper Rio Grande

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Author: Charles Montgomery

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00-C1946-FM 11/16/2001 2:23 PM Page i

The Spanish Redemption

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Fireside “tales of the old days” in Trampas, New Mexico. Photo by John Collier, 1943, Library of Congress.

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The Spanish Redemption Heritage, Power, and Loss on New Mexico’s Upper Rio Grande

Charles Montgomery

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Berkeley / Los Angeles / London

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The publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous contribution to this book provided by the General Endowment of the University of California Press Associates. University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England © 2002 by The Regents of the University of California Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Montgomery, Charles H., 1964 – The Spanish redemption : heritage, power, and loss on New Mexico’s Upper Rio Grande / Charles Montgomery. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 0-520-22971-1 (Cloth : alk. paper) 1. Spanish Americans—New Mexico—History. 2. Spanish Americans— New Mexico—Intellectual life. 3. Spanish Americans—New Mexico— Ethnic identity. 4. Colonial revival (Art)—New Mexico. 5. Colonial revival (Architecture)—New Mexico. 6. New Mexico— Civilization. 7. New Mexico—Ethnic relations. 8. Rio Grande Valley— Civilization. 9. Rio Grande Valley—Ethnic Relations. i. Title. f805.s75 m66 2002 978.900468 — dc21 2001005649 Manufactured in the United States of America 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 03 02 01 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of 1997) (Permanence of Paper).

ANSI / NISO Z39.48 –1992 (R

Portions of chapter 2 originally appeared as “Becoming SpanishAmerican: Race and Rhetoric in New Mexico Politics, 1880 –1920,” Journal of American Ethnic History 20 (Summer 2001): 59 –84. Reprinted by permission.

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In memory of Seth D. Montgomery He knew the land and its people.

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The Southwest has been conquered at various intervals by diverse peoples. There are those who came with the trappings of war and again those who held aloft the cross. There came finally commercialism and with it the modern industries. Each had their day and their function and each conquest was more far-reaching than that which preceded it. Within the past few years there has appeared the advance guard of a new conquering host which is doing more than merely occupying the land, a host that is taking hold of the imagination of men and creating in them a new and nobler spirit. “The Santa Fe–Taos Art Colony,” El Palacio, 1916

I think New Mexico was the greatest experience from the outside world that I have ever had. D. H. Lawrence, 1931

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Contents

List of Maps

ix

Preface

xi

Acknowledgments

xv

Introduction

1

1. Hispano Fortunes in New Mexico, 1598 –1900

20

2. The Race Issue and the “Spanish-American” in Party Politics, 1900 –1920

54

3. Mission Architecture and Colonial Civility, 1904 –1920

89

4. Discovering “Spanish Culture” at the Santa Fe Fiesta, 1919 –1936

128

5. The Revival of Spanish Colonial Arts, 1924 –1936

158

6. Regionalism and the Literature of the Soil, 1928 –1938

190

Conclusion: The Coronado Cuarto Centennial and the Depletion of Spanish Heritage

217

Notes

231

Bibliography

295

Index

327

Illustrations follow page 88.

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Maps

1. The upper Rio Grande 2. Hispano settlement and areal expansion 3. Spanish-speaking vote, by county, 1915

ix

6 30 67

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Preface

The principal events described in this book occurred in an extraordinary place and time in modern America: the upper Rio Grande area of New Mexico during the first four decades of the twentieth century. This was a setting of stunning natural beauty. Suffused by the light of the high Southwest, the region’s lush mountains and austere plateaus marked a world apart from the factories and fields of an industrializing nation. No less singular were the area’s inhabitants. English-speaking Anglos, Spanish-speaking Hispanos, and numerous Pueblo tribes made up what the writer Paul Horgan later called the “heroic triad,” a confluence of three seemingly alien cultures. As a chronicler of the upper Rio Grande, Horgan followed Charles Lummis, Willa Cather, D. H. Lawrence, and Oliver La Farge in a line of celebrated writers who were entranced by its land and people. Of special interest to them was the area’s place in twentieth-century America. Over and over the writers were struck by an apparent rupture of time, a separation of Anglo newcomers from the more native peoples and of the region itself from places to the east. That the writers’ observations were shaped by the biases of their age does not diminish their enthusiasm, and often great affection, for a place and a people that seemed to stand apart from the modern world. The peoples of New Mexico were never as alien to each other, or to modern life, as Anglo writers liked to think. Still, the coexistence of Indians, Hispanos, and Anglos in northern New Mexico has never been easy. It has always demanded constant negotiation and mutual concession. That was true for Indian communities and Spanish settlers centuries ago, and it has remained true for Hispanos and Anglos up to the xi

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P R E FAC E

present day. In the twentieth century, as Indians became a people largely of the farming village and the reservation, segregated for the most part from New Mexico’s larger towns, businesses, and political parties, Hispanos and Anglos shared control of the state’s political economy. Brought together by the pursuit of wealth, they often worked in close proximity yet rarely stood in side-by-side accord. They remained divided by language, custom, religion, perceived physical differences, and decades of suspicion. To get along they established formal means of sharing power and, perhaps more important, unspoken rules of daily interaction. One such rule involved the naming of Hispanos. Twenty-five years ago, when I was in a Santa Fe grade school, I already knew that Anglos always referred to their Spanish-speaking classmates and their families as Spanish. Chicano was a derisive term, very often a fighting word. Mexican was wholly taboo, a slur term no self-respecting Anglo, not even a child, would utter in public. Even in the heyday of the Chicano movement, the belief that Spanish-speaking people were culturally Spanish, certainly not Mexican or Indian, was never in question. The spirit of chicanismo, so strong in Texas and California, could not dislodge a Spanish colonial legacy in New Mexico that seemed to reach back to 1598. In 1975, it seemed only reasonable to assume that Spanishspeaking residents, and northern New Mexico itself, continued to live out that legacy. After all, many Hispano families could demonstrate at least an indirect descent from the first Spanish settlers, and Hispano folklore bore an unmistakable colonial influence. So too did the upper Rio Grande’s architecture, its arts, and its major public festivals. When Hispanos and Anglos got together to honor their region’s Spanish past, our families pictured an undisturbed colonial inheritance reaching into our own time. What few of us realized is that the upper Rio Grande’s Spanish character owes as much to 1880 as to 1598. The year 1880, the great watershed in modern New Mexico history, marked the formal arrival of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad, at once a harbinger and an engine of change. As the railroad brought capital and migrants into New Mexico, Anglo entrepreneurs and corporations posed an unprecedented challenge to Hispano wealth and political power. It was that racial confrontation, and the steady ascent of Anglo fortunes it foretold, that gave rise to the upper Rio Grande’s modern Spanish heritage. Only after the railroad’s arrival did Hispanos aggressively promote a public Spanish identity in party politics and folklore. Only after 1880, and es-

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P R E FAC E

xiii

pecially 1900, did Anglos celebrate Spanish colonial imagery in art, architecture, and literature. Between roughly 1900 and 1940, prominent figures from both groups drew on Hispano-Catholic traditions to create a modern Spanish heritage, a language of public symbols to suit the twentieth-century aspirations of New Mexico’s leading citizens. With each activity that it encompassed, from party politics to architecture to literature to street festivals, the newly articulated heritage presented a distinctly colonial image of Hispano New Mexico. This book describes how the area’s modern Spanish heritage arose: how historical changes at the turn of the century set off public tributes to a colonial past. It also explores the social function of the Spanish heritage, the linkage between its expression—whether in a book, a building, or a public speech—and New Mexico’s social structure and dynamics. Most generally, the following pages reflect on what the rebirth of Spain on the upper Rio Grande tells us about American culture writ large. This final inquiry, presupposing a broad historical significance, may strike readers as misguided. Some will undoubtedly assume that few, if any, events in this small area can shed much light on our national life. Such an assumption is in fact shared by many historians of the United States. In spite of efforts to enlarge their collective vision, scholars still assign more weight to historical studies of Virginia or New York than to works on the interior Southwest, the latter being regarded somewhat condescendingly as contributions to a “regional history.” To be fair, one must note that the Southwest and New Mexico’s upper Rio Grande in particular have long been considered off the beaten track. The region was regarded as an outpost of New Spain in the eighteenth century, of the Mexican nation after 1821, and of the United States after 1850. A perception of isolation is therefore not wholly unwarranted. Yet in its seemingly peripheral location, the upper Rio Grande can still offer insight into problems at the core of American history. For four centuries, it has been a place of profound cultural encounters. By 1880, now lying at the boundary of American power, it was the setting in which a vibrant Hispano civilization confronted Anglo migrants and the dynamics of industrial capitalism. As is true of any clash of cultures, the confrontation laid bare the character of both peoples. Pitting Anglo merchants and bankers against a largely agrarian society, the collision brought to light the character of America’s “machine civilization” and offered critics a model to challenge it. Exposing the biases of the newcomers, the confrontation revealed the complex and contradictory nature of racial perceptions. Exerting pressure

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P R E FAC E

on Hispanos, the standoff made clear the diverse layers and interests of a southwestern Spanish-speaking culture. Above all, in pitting two formidable rivals against each other, the encounter prompted Anglos and Hispanos to find a common ground of historical symbols, a place where amicable memories of New Mexico’s past inevitably obscured the full story of power and loss.

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Acknowledgments

Unlike authors who list a thousand debts of gratitude, I seem to have missed my chance to get a lot of people involved in this project. That is why I am all the more grateful to those who offered guidance of one kind or another over the last few years. They all helped to make this a better book. My study began as a dissertation, and much of its character can be traced to the people who first taught me something about history. Of the many professors I was privileged to know in graduate school, four continue to shape my thoughts: R. Lawrence Moore, Carol Greenhouse, Isabel Hull, and Michael Kammen. Seldom does a week pass when I do not reflect on the examples they set. Their teaching and those beautiful days in Ithaca are joined together as a single memory. When I set out on my first of many research trips to the Southwest, I discovered that I would not have to work entirely on my own. Like many historians, I was most fortunate to have the support of dedicated and very helpful archivists: Ann Massmann, Kathlene Ferris, Stella De Sa Rego, and Terry Gugliotta at the Center for Southwest Research; Orlando Romero, Hazel Romero, and Art Olivas at the Museum of New Mexico; Sandra Jaramillo, Al Regensberg, and Lee Goodwin at the New Mexico State Records Center; Peter Blodgett, Erin Chase, and Jennifer Watts at the Huntington Library; and Jan Grenci at the Library of Congress. My research at these and other institutions would not have been possible without the generous financial assistance of the Andrew Mellon Foundation, the W. M. Keck Foundation, Cornell University, the University of Florida, and the National Endowment for the Huxv

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AC K N O W L E D G M E N T S

manities, which provided me with a Summer Stipend in 1998. I am especially grateful to the Huntington Library and its able director of research, Roy Ritchie, for offering funding and encouragement to help me get my project off the ground. Some of the best advice on how to approach my research came from scholars in Santa Fe and Albuquerque. Douglas Schwartz, Molly Mullin, Tomás Atencio, Sylvia Rodríguez, Tom Chávez, and Felipe Gonzales were among those who steered me in the right direction. Stan Hordes set me straight early on and has never stopped offering encouragement. Once I began putting my ideas on paper, I relied repeatedly on colleagues and critics to read drafts and help me through conceptual problems. In this regard I thank Steve Hackel, Shannon Smith, Gary Okihiro, Jeff Adler, Murdo MacLeod, Maria Todorova, Chris Wilson, George Lipsitz, David Weber, David Gutiérrez, and William Deverell. Some time ago, as the initial draft of the book was nearing premature completion, four very different scholars stepped in and convinced me I had more to do. The detailed and sometimes impassioned critiques of Ramón Gutiérrez, Marta Weigle, Sarah Deutsch, and Marc Simmons prodded me to think more deeply about recovering New Mexico’s past. Marta Weigle stressed the difference between a dissertation and a book. Sarah Deutsch, who had never heard of me, sent eleven single-spaced pages of comments. Marc Simmons found almost nothing worthwhile in the first draft but inspired me to try again. I was able to do so only because of the patience of my agreeable editor, Monica McCormick. Finally, I thank the people whose inspiration and support made this book possible: Tina Caton, Concha Ortiz y Pino de Kleven, Beatrice Chauvenet, Bill, Charles O. Cook, Jr., Andy, David, Liz, Karen, and especially my parents, Seth and Margaret Montgomery, of whom I simply cannot say enough. Last but hardly least, I thank my heroic but everso-modest wife, Linda Curchin. Her enchantment with everyday life is a lesson in itself.

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Introduction

In July 1925 Harper’s Monthly Magazine published “New Mexico and the Backwash of Spain,” one in a series of articles on the modern American West. The author of the series, Katharine Fullerton Gerould, aimed to demystify the West, to separate good from bad, elevated and inspiring from base and dismal. In previous pieces she had described the beauty of the Pacific Coast and chided Reno for running a seedy divorce industry. Now, turning to New Mexico, she found almost nothing to recommend. Although enchanted by New Mexico’s dry land and Pueblo Indians, she presented the state as otherwise uncivilized and tawdry, a place of frontier lawlessness, corrupt politicians, and vulgar tourists. In keeping with the title of her article, she saved most of her disdain for the state’s Spanish-speaking population, or, more precisely, for the poorest two-thirds of it, the people whom she collectively labeled the “dusty background against which life must move.” Or, put most simply, the “Mexican.” For Gerould, as for many observers before her, the “Mexican,” described as a singular object, turned New Mexico’s Spanish-speaking people into a flat plane of reference, an uninspiring backdrop to the feverish activity of Anglo America. “[T]oo ignorant, too mongrel, too indolent,” the “Mexican” appeared to be steadily losing ground, soon to succumb to the “dominant race.” 1 New Mexico’s Anglo businessmen responded to Gerould’s article with typical indignation. They ignored her treatment of Hispanos and took issue instead with her claims of roving outlaws and political graft.2 The most acid rejoinder came from Santa Fe, the state capital. The city’s business groups were not about to let a New York City magazine accuse them of coarseness. They tartly assured Harper’s that Santa Fe’s 1

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I N T RO D U C T I O N

insurance agents, merchants, hardware dealers, and “golfers in knickers” were fully up to date with the latest national trends.3 Indeed, their protests were a bit too strenuous. Perhaps they feared that Gerould had a point. They certainly recognized that Santa Fe was no ordinary state capital. In 1925 most of its 8,000-odd residents were not Anglo bankers or insurance agents but Spanish-speaking farmers, woodcutters, shop owners, housekeepers, and day laborers. If golf was catching on among Anglo residents, it was a minor diversion from the daily expressions of Hispano culture. Public life in and around Santa Fe was thoroughly dominated by the Spanish language one heard on the streets, the gatherings of Hispano families, and the Catholic festivals and ceremonies that marked the passing of seasons. The influence of Anglo America was further held in check by northern New Mexico’s Pueblo Indians. On irrigated bottomlands just outside city limits, the Pueblo people lived in communities that long predated the sixteenth-century arrival of Spanish explorers. There they fashioned the pottery and practiced the religious ceremonies that fascinated many a tourist in Santa Fe. Together, Hispano and Pueblo lives also attracted a different kind of Anglo. In the late 1910s artists and writers began to straggle into Santa Fe, some looking for new aesthetic paths, others desperately seeking relief from pulmonary disease. What a good number found was a transcendent feeling of authenticity, a sense that the preindustrial experience of making a clay pot or hauling piñon wood on the back of a burro answered the nagging question, asked with growing urgency back East, of how one should live amid the encroaching industry and bureaucracy of modern America.4 Inspired by the Santa Fe scene, the Anglo writers and artists took steps to preserve it. In keeping with their own interests, their chief aim was to safeguard Indian and Hispano arts. Pueblo culture attracted the earlier and larger following. Midwestern-born artist Kenneth Chapman, New York painter John Sloan, and Chicago poet Alice Corbin were among those who spread the gospel of Indian weaving, painting, and pottery. Interest in Hispanos arose later but gained momentum in the late 1920s. New Jersey artist Frank Applegate and California writer Mary Austin took the lead in celebrating the aesthetic qualities of Hispano wood carving and weaving. In 1925 the pair founded the Spanish Colonial Arts Society, an organization dedicated not only to preserving the craftsmanship of the Hispano village but also, in Mary Austin’s view, to turning local cultural expressions into nourishment for an anemic America. In fact, Katharine Gerould’s article appeared just at the moment

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Austin was endeavoring to present Hispano culture not as an inanimate backdrop to an Anglo drama but as a vital exhibition in its own right, one that could prove highly instructive to disenchanted Americans.5 The new image was reflected in Austin’s response to Gerould’s article. In a lengthy rejoinder she vigorously defended Spanish-speaking New Mexicans. But she did so by changing the terms of discussion. To understand New Mexico’s Spanish-speaking people, she wrote, one must appreciate the state’s Spanish past: as descendants of New Mexico’s early colonists, Hispanos carry within them a vibrant Spanish folk culture. “[N]othing that could be said of them would be more misrepresentative than that they have ‘Mexican souls,’” Austin wrote. Whatever their hardships and deprivations, they are a people “whose blood and way of life and mode of thought is predominantly Spanish.” 6 When Austin used “Mexican” and “Spanish” in this way, she well understood that the terms carried meaning far beyond New Mexico. She knew that “Mexican” brought to mind the disagreeable image of the impoverished mestizo, while “Spanish” evoked a redeeming if slightly decadent European character. Gerould, too, recognized “Spanish” as a mark of some distinction. She compared abject Mexican peasants to the Oteros and Chaveses, those “old Spanish families” of Santa Fe who struck her as a genuine if diminished New Mexico aristocracy.7 Yet if Gerould sensed in Santa Fe the residue of European civility, she also suggested that New Mexico’s Spanish and Mexican elements were more alike than different. Both contributed to the state’s ongoing social decay. Both lacked the industry and stamina to compete with the enterprising Anglo. Both were part of the “backwash” of Spanish colonization—now a stagnant pool, becoming ever smaller and more brackish, long after the colonial high tide.8 Austin’s perspective was entirely different. She found in New Mexico’s Spanish colonial past an invigorating legacy. As it animated her own interest in folklife, a Spanish inheritance seemed to lift even the poorest Spanish-speaking people out of an undifferentiated Mexican mass. Rather than confine them to the margins of history, it transformed them into a rich folk culture, a people whose religious customs and artistic expressions might enliven a tired nation. “[T]he Spanish Colonials in New Mexico never represented a ‘backwash’ of any kind,” she wrote. Rather, “[t]hey came as an offshoot of the siglo del oro, the golden century of Spain. . . . In the high tide of this racial vigor the founders of our best Spanish Colonial families . . . [came] with prodigies of heroism and explorative adventure. And in their descendants

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something of that darting acuteness remains to find expression.” In other words, Austin might say, Gerould got it exactly backward: it was modern America that was decadent and lifeless, and it was New Mexico’s humble farmers and herders, inheritors of a Spanish past, who offered hope for America’s future.9 By itself, Austin’s defense of New Mexico’s “Spanish colonial” people constitutes a chapter of her fascinating biography. It may even sum up the sentiments of her Santa Fe colleagues—the poets, writers, and artists whom Gerould derided as “the Santa Fe cult.” The significance of her ideas has always seemed to end there, though. Austin did not represent the town’s Anglo business clubs or its Hispano mutual aid societies. Nor did she speak for the ranchers, miners, and farmers who lived beyond city limits. Most New Mexicans, concerned mainly with making a living in a dry land, had little in common with the colorful Santa Fe aesthetes. Yet Austin’s way of thinking was not as insular as one might suppose. By 1925 people well outside her Santa Fe circle were taking a new look at the upper Rio Grande. From roughly 1900 to 1940, men and women, Anglos and Hispanos, rich and poor all used the visual and rhetorical symbolism of the state’s colonial past to redefine Spanish-speaking New Mexico. Working in separate areas—in politics, literature, civic festivals, and the arts—they came together to make New Mexico’s modern Spanish heritage, a legacy for the present day that recast Gerould’s “Mexican” as the progeny of a vibrant Spanish past. To understand what they were up to, one must first think about the peculiar place where they lived. For much of the twentieth century, New Mexico’s ineffable Spanish character has been everywhere but nowhere, easy to notice but hard to locate or describe. Take, as an example, the case of northern New Mexico’s “Spanish colonial arts.” Just after 1925, the carved and woven objects were sold on the streets of Santa Fe and in shops as far away as New York and Chicago. During the 1930s, they were at the center of a state program designed to teach unemployed Hispanos marketable skills. Yet it is hard to know what the handmade objects signified to local buyers, or even to Spanish-speaking villagers not far from Santa Fe. Similarly, it is hard to gauge the intensity of a Spanish heritage or measure its dimensions. To study it, one must therefore begin by locating the particular place in which it arose, the area of northern and central New Mexico formed by two adjacent zones, the Rio Arriba and the Rio Abajo. In the sixteenth century, when Spaniards first made their way up the Rio Grande’s broad floodplain, they came to a point where the river’s

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progressively steepening banks gave way to canyon walls. Lying near the Pueblo village of Cochiti, the site came to be known as the divide between New Mexico’s upriver and downriver zones, two adjacent subregions that were administered separately by Spanish authorities and to this day remain part of New Mexico’s cultural geography. Roughly speaking, the upriver area, the Rio Arriba, comprises the state’s northcentral mountains and river valleys on both sides of the Rio Grande between Cochiti and Colorado’s San Luis Valley. The Rio Arriba was the earliest and most densely settled area of Spanish colonization, and with its numerous picturesque villages, set among pine forests and snowcapped peaks, it remained during the twentieth century a much-loved wellspring of colonial imagery. The Rio Abajo, the downriver region, was recognized as the area of gently sloping land between Cochiti and Socorro. Drier and not as densely settled as the Rio Arriba, the downriver zone had the advantage of fertile soils and warmer temperatures. In the nineteenth century, owing to its agricultural productivity, it supported New Mexico’s most powerful Hispano families. To recognize the role of both regions in the making of Spanish heritage, I refer to them collectively, and in distinction from the Rio Grande of Texas fame, as New Mexico’s upper Rio Grande (see map 1).10 In 1598, when Spanish colonists settled at Ohke, a Tewa Indian village at the heart of the Rio Arriba, a new chapter opened in the upper Rio Grande’s chronicle of cultural encounters. To make sense of the native societies they met, the Spaniards classified Indians by apparent levels of civility. Nomadic groups, principally Apaches, Comanches, and Navajos, were known as indios bárbaros, or savage Indians, while the more sedentary Pueblo people were judged relatively civilized but still inferior to Christian settlers. If the distinction between European and Indian comforted the settlers, it could not keep indigenous influences out of their communities. Indian clothing and building techniques were readily adopted by the colonists. Indian slaves brought lore and new racial strains into Spanish-speaking society. And by trading with Hispanos, Indians helped to sustain a province that was separated from the center of New Spain by at least six months of overland travel. Less obviously, but of equal importance, Pueblo and nomad peoples served as the colonists’ foil of racial aspiration, embodying the lowly counterpart to the elevated notion of español. Sadly, the Spanish impact on New Mexico’s Indians was not so beneficial. Not long after colonists settled in New Mexico, nomad and Pueblo communities fell into demographic decline. In 1600 between forty thousand and eighty thousand Pueblos resided in some sixty

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Costilla Questa

Chama R io C h am a

Cuba Rio

Arroyo Seco Taos

Abiquiu Truchas Trampas Española Cordova Mora Chimayo Cochiti Pueblo Santa Fe

rco Pue

Las Vegas

Bernalillo Albuquerque

Los Chavez

Placitas

San Miguel del Vado

Escabosa Los Lunas Estancia Belen

Gr a n d e

Socorro

R io

San Mateo

Tierra Amarilla El Rito

Rio Abajo Rio Arriba 0

50 Miles

Las Cruces

NEW MEXICO

m ap 1. The upper Rio Grande

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self-sufficient villages. By 1790 the Pueblo population had fallen to 9,500. In New Mexico’s modern period, beginning with annexation by the United States in 1848, Indians were either pushed onto reservations or isolated on steadily shrinking pockets of land. In both cases they lost their role as central participants in New Mexico’s political economy. By 1900 the territorial census counted only 8,488 Pueblos and 5,309 nomadic Indians, the vast majority of whom worked as farmers or herders, living in isolation from New Mexico’s centers of population and industry. Not until the 1940s did New Mexico even grant Indians the right to vote.11 As Indians lost ground, Hispanos advanced, although hardly to a position of outright dominance. Contrary to familiar images of imposing conquistadores and tidy Franciscan missions, Hispano society remained weak and precarious through much of the Spanish colonial era. When Pueblo villages revolted against Spanish rule in 1680, New Mexico had only 2,500 Spaniards, a number that included mestizos and assimilated Indians. By 1790, a full century after the Spanish reconquest, the number had risen to a stabler but still vulnerable 16,000. The vast majority of colonists were clustered in small settlements along the Rio Grande between Taos and Belen, hemmed in by Comanches and Apaches to the east and west. Significant territorial and demographic gains came only in the nineteenth century. As the threat of Indian attacks waned, Spanish-speaking people rapidly expanded outward from the river valley. By 1900 direct and indirect descendants of Spanish mestizo colonists had spread across some 85,000 square miles, covering most of New Mexico and reaching into Texas, Oklahoma, Colorado, and Arizona. New Mexico’s total Spanish-speaking population stood at about 120,000, most of whom were descended at least indirectly from the mestizo colonists.12 Even as Hispano society spread its wings, however, Anglo Americans were poised to take control. For much of the nineteenth century, Anglos had constituted a mere fraction of New Mexican society. When New Mexico became a U.S. territory in 1850, it contained at least 57,000 Hispanos and roughly 2,000 Anglos.13 As late as 1880, when railroad tracks reached Santa Fe, the Anglo population remained at little more than 10,000, at least eight times smaller than Hispano society.14 Yet by 1900 Hispanos outnumbered Anglos by only three to one, and the ratio was declining rapidly. Within ten years, a decade’s worth of Anglo migration had boosted the American-born white population of the territory from 167,000 to 282,000, 41 percent of whom had been born outside New Mexico.15 Equally daunting was the changing state of New Mexico’s political economy. Hispanos were dismayed to see Anglo wealth and

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political power growing even faster than the Anglo population. At the turn of the century the newcomers controlled the territory’s new railroad and mining industries, its law firms and banks, and its largest newspapers. Anglos led both political parties and constituted virtually all federally appointed officials. Combined with the accelerating pace of Anglo migration, economic and political gains were rapidly changing the complexion of New Mexico. No longer a “Mexican” territory, yet still very unlike a typical American state, New Mexico exhibited a decidedly mixed character. In fact, the territory’s population was more diverse than the terms “Anglo” and “Hispano” can convey. The “Anglo” contingent was made up mostly of English-speaking Protestants of northern European ancestry, but it included sizable portions of Irish, Italian, Jewish, and other immigrant groups. German Jews, in particular, gained prominence as pioneering merchants and creditors. The larger Protestant population was itself divided, at times irreconcilably, between northern Republicans and southern Democrats. “Hispanos” were nearly as diverse. Although mostly Catholic and uniformly Spanish speaking, they were a people of complicated ethnoracial origins. The colonial settlers from whom most Hispanos had at least indirectly descended were the product of generations of unions among Spaniards (both peninsulares, those who were born in Spain, and criollos, those whose parents were Iberian born), mestizos, mulattoes, and New Mexico’s Indian tribes. By 1900 the colonial claim of limpieza de sangre, purity of Spanish blood, was seldom taken seriously. The proud few who continued to make it were found in New Mexico’s wealthiest, most influential Spanish-speaking families. Known as los ricos (the wealthy), they accounted for less than 5 percent of the Hispano population. Sending their sons to midwestern and eastern Catholic academies, they made small fortunes in trade and sheep ranching. At 1900, though under pressure from Anglo migrants, they still constituted New Mexico’s landed gentry. At the other end of Hispano society were the people known as las mases de los hombres pobres (the poor masses), or, more simply, as los pobres or los paisanos (the poor or the peasants). These farmers, house servants, woodcutters, sheepherders, and day laborers accounted for roughly eight of every ten Spanish-speaking people. With little hope of improving their social station, los paisanos spent their days in fields and pastures, their nights in cramped and crumbling adobes.16 The diverse character of the Anglo and Hispano groups should not, however, obscure the sharp line dividing them. More than affiliations of

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region, religion, ethnicity, and social status, it was the racial division of Hispano and Anglo that defined one’s place in turn-of-the-century territorial life. The racial fault line ran even deeper than the fissures of wealth and status that cut through Anglo and especially Hispano society. Long before the Anglo set foot in New Mexico, prominent Hispanos had thoroughly exploited los paisanos. Through a ranching system akin to sharecropping, los ricos dragooned vulnerable sheepherders into debt peonage and, after New Mexico became an American territory, used them to serve self-aggrandizing political machines. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, however, los ricos and los paisanos both suddenly faced an unprecedented challenge. Confronted by a rapid influx of Anglo migrants, some of whom aimed to divest Hispanos of land and political office, the two Spanish-speaking groups contemplated the real possibility of losing their property and civil rights. Still divided by their separate material interests, rich and poor increasingly shared a common perspective on New Mexico’s racialized landscape.17 In plain sight by 1900, the racial split had been widening for several decades. In the 1820s Anglo explorers, traders, and fur trappers had wisely sought to blend in to Spanish-speaking society. Some converted to Catholicism and married Hispanas, and all learned to speak and dress like their hosts.18 Rarely, however, did they abandon the distinction between the seemingly listless “Mexican” and the enterprising “American.” That racial polarity only intensified during the crucial decade of the 1840s. Throughout the United States, domestic social pressures combined with expansionist aspirations to bring into full bloom an American faith in a white and virtuous republic. Imported to New Mexico during the military campaign of 1846, the racial-nationalist creed encouraged the newcomers to disdain the “Mexicans” for decades hence. Anglos did not, of course, view all “Mexicans” in the same light. As in other parts of the Southwest, perceptions of Spanish-speaking society varied according to considerations of Hispano wealth, social status, education, and gender. An additional complication was physical appearance. Although Hispanos were readily distinguished from Anglos by language, religion, and social custom, their pigmentation and physiognomy did not always set them apart. Many “Mexicans,” that is to say, were of a darker complexion than Anglos, but others could easily pass as “white.” For the outnumbered newcomers, the physical variations made it even more necessary to construct and constantly reinforce the idea of a fundamental racial divide. In other words, Spanish-speaking people, especially those of the poorer classes, had to be actively perceived

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as separate and inferior; they had to be regarded as a people whose natural traits, such as indolence and backwardness, justified the advance of the seemingly industrious and progressive Anglo.19 So conceived and constructed, racial difference in New Mexico worked hand in hand with political-economic expansion, just as it did throughout the American West. As Anglo entrepreneurs and corporations throughout the West laid claim to natural resources, particularly land and minerals, they discovered that much of the region’s productive potential would have to be repossessed.20 The inevitable confrontation with ethnic Mexicans brought rapid change. In California, Anglo migrants gained control of the state legislature and enacted laws against Mexican miners and landowners. In some cases the newcomers turned to violence and outright confiscation.21 In South Texas, Anglo farmers and cattle ranchers relied on superior numbers and lines of capital to gain commercial dominance by the turn of the century. As Mexican vaqueros lost their herds, they were forced into sharecropping and migrant farming. In El Paso and southern Arizona, ethnic Mexicans labored in the copper and railroad industries. In each area, ethnic Mexicans were reduced from owners or users of productive land to dependent laborers.22 Central to the Anglo success was the idea of race. While the takeover did not in principle hinge on perceptions of racial difference, in practice it went hand in hand with the creation of a racial antagonist, that is, the construction of ethnic Mexicans as benighted subordinates. In other words, Anglos conquered ethnic Mexicans by taking their resources while defining them as racially inferior and properly marginal to white society.23 At times conquest also involved making a deal. Wherever outnumbered Anglos faced an entrenched Spanish-speaking society, they formed commercial and political alliances with the local elite. In parts of California and Texas, for example, Anglo merchants, bankers, and lawyers teamed up with Spanish-speaking landowners and ranchers. Although Anglos typically controlled such arrangements, members of the two groups found that they spoke a common language—that of power and profit—and they saw opportunities for mutual gain.24 Cooperation of that sort was especially common in New Mexico. Anglos and Hispanos worked side by side in business and politics, and they strengthened their partnerships through intermarriage.25 But it was not simply the breadth of cooperation that set New Mexico apart. More consequential was the peculiar condition that promoted racial accommodation in the first place: the territory’s turn-of-the-century racial stale-

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mate. By 1900 Anglo migrants were overwhelming ethnic Mexicans in Texas and California. As the migrants raised California’s population above 1.5 million, ethnic Mexicans, native born and immigrant, numbered only about 40,000. In South Texas, the sizable Spanish-speaking population was made up of landless or land-poor immigrants and their offspring.26 Meanwhile, Hispano influence in New Mexico was still near its peak. As los ricos continued to raise sheep on vast ranches, los paisanos tended their fields and pastures. Together, the two classes held a demographic and electoral advantage that deterred Anglo migration and capital investment. Not that Hispanos had much room to maneuver. They certainly did not control New Mexico, or even their upper Rio Grande stronghold. The nineteenth-century influence of their fathers was slipping fast, and the future did not look bright. As they lost commercial influence, they also recognized that Anglo migration was accelerating, bringing into the territory ever more settlers who were decidedly unfriendly to “Mexicans.” The result was a standoff, a balance of power tilting gradually in the Anglo’s favor. For the moment, neither Hispanos nor Anglos could immediately establish absolute dominance; each had to deal with the actual or potential power of the other. As the struggle for supremacy continued, the two groups worked together, finding common ground in business, politics, and, most notably, in the realm of culture. Along with negotiating the distribution of wealth and votes, that is, they achieved a rhetorical compromise, a way to talk about New Mexico and its people that was acceptable—and seemingly beneficial—to both groups.27 The rhetorical common ground lay in New Mexico’s Spanish colonial past. Extending from Juan de Oñate’s colonizing expedition of 1598 to Mexican independence in 1821, the colonial era offered its twentiethcentury admirers the verbal and visual symbols that I refer to as New Mexico’s modern Spanish heritage. “Heritage” often connotes an expansive inventory of the past, complete with objects, texts, buildings, and historic sites that today make up a global “heritage industry.” I use the term in a more restrictive but less tangible sense. The upper Rio Grande’s Spanish heritage took the form of verbal and visual symbols that evoked days past without an attempt to preserve or re-create them.28 As a set of public symbols, the heritage functioned as a shared idiom, a common vocabulary for talking and thinking about the upper Rio Grande. Alongside the private memories and traditions of the colonial era, those still preserved and practiced in some measure by Spanish-

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speaking families, the modern Spanish heritage constituted a very public sense of inheritance, one that prominent Hispanos and Anglos evoked to change the way outsiders, and they themselves, imagined New Mexican society. In this sense, the Spanish heritage did not constitute a particular cultural or ethnic “identity.” Though fueled by private memories, it had less to do with how people understood their lives privately than how they talked about their social setting in public. Nor was the making of this public heritage deliberate. No individual or group set out to construct a new idiom for understanding the upper Rio Grande. It arose instead from the Spanish colonial revival, a sequence of tributes to the upper Rio Grande’s colonial past carried out by separate generations of relatively prominent New Mexicans, Hispanos and Anglos, men and women, all of decidedly different interests and sensibilities—yet all intent on “redeeming” los paisanos, transforming them in a discursive sense into bearers of a distinctive racial and cultural legacy. Before elaborating the motives behind the revival, I must say a word or two about the concepts of symbol, idiom, and public heritage. Following World War II, several of America’s leading historians and literary critics adopted “symbol” as a tool for interpreting American culture writ large from the recognized classics of American literature. Henry Nash Smith, R. W. B. Lewis, Leo Marx, and Alan Trachtenberg were among the more prominent scholars who found literary symbols such as “the machine” or “the garden” reflective of deep historical truths. Their analyses proceeded on the assumption that such symbols, encoded in works of high art, evoked the shared myths by which Americans understood their lives.29 During the 1970s, the so-called myth and symbol approach to American Studies came under fierce attack. Among other things, critics questioned whether the expressions of a literary elite could offer real insight into the diverse experiences of the American nation.30 The skepticism prompted scholars hungry for more rigorous methods to turn to anthropology, a discipline that was also better suited for exploring the more popular forms of cultural expression, such as parades or festivals, to which historians were increasingly turning. By far the favorite anthropological authority was Clifford Geertz, in large part because he seemed to address historians’ concerns about the gap between symbolic expressions and social experience. In advocating what he called “thick description,” Geertz admonished his readers to “keep the analysis of symbolic forms . . . closely tied . . . to concrete social events and occasions.” 31 For a decade or so, Geertz buoyed the writing of American cultural history. Confident of his own ability to

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decode symbolic expressions in places as diverse as Morocco and Indonesia, he served as a kind of intellectual foundation for studies of the United States. Yet confidence in thick description, whether practiced by anthropologists or historians, was soon dealt a blow. The culprit was the so-called linguistic turn in the humanities. By the mid-1980s historians and other scholars were reconsidering the relationship between the once-stable categories of symbolic representation and concrete social reality. The question they continue to debate is the degree to which the act of representation, performed by language and linguistic codes, is not only reflective but also constitutive of social reality. If the social realm (tangible objects, people, resources, etc.) is knowable only through representation, then what degree of historical significance can seemingly concrete phenomena have apart from language? And how can one find solid footing for interpreting symbols in the first place? In short, the linguistic turn forced historians to confront the bedeviling question of how they should attempt to explain or even understand historical change.32 My modest study of New Mexico’s upper Rio Grande makes no attempt to solve this daunting question, although my inclination is to treat the social realm of people and things with a considerable degree of respect. My narrower and more immediate concern is to define the linguistic character of the region’s modern Spanish heritage. In keeping with assumptions common to a long tradition of cultural studies, my own work hinges on the concept of mediation. It presupposes that the verbal and visual symbols that constituted the new heritage acted as lenses that mediated between the objective “facts” and the constructed meanings of everyday life. My study also recognizes, however, that such symbols were not of unlimited potency or scope. They were deployed primarily by and for elite New Mexicans, and they expressed meanings that were often ancillary to matters of political economy. In other words, Spanish colonial symbols were only sometimes of interest to the real movers and shakers of early-twentieth-century New Mexico, the men who built their power from mining or ranching while holding sway in party politics. In that sense, the modern Spanish heritage was less a systematic language of representation, a formal set of linguistic codes and grammars, than a symbolic vocabulary, an idiom that many people recognized but comparatively few “spoke” on a daily basis.33 That Spanish colonial symbols could nonetheless present northern New Mexico’s Hispano population in a new light, and in turn mediate a new image of the upper Rio Grande, is explained by their emergence as a distinctively

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public heritage. “Public heritage” refers to imagery that is deliberately fashioned for public experience. Unlike a collective memory, which lies somewhere beneath the texture of everyday life, potent yet unrecorded and often ineffable, a public heritage is a highly articulated rendering of the past that appears in public spaces, writings, and conversations. It is put on display for all to see.34 On the upper Rio Grande, the modern Spanish heritage was not only expressed and dramatized in public but was constructed as a public realm, a figurative place in which all New Mexicans—Hispano and Anglo, rich and poor—might reside.35 The construction commenced about 1900, following a period in which Spain was exiled to the realm of private memory. For many years after 1821, if a family treasured its descent from los primeros pobladores, the first settlers, reference to the Spanish colonial era was seldom made at public events. If colonial traditions were embedded in the customs of daily life, in folk songs or dances, for example, they were not distilled into symbols on which both Hispano and Anglo were called to reflect. Basic terms of identification are illustrative. In the English language most Hispanos were known as “Mexicans.” Even los ricos, though occasionally described as Spanish, were identified more often as “civilized” or “educated” Mexicans. Similarly, when speaking Spanish, Hispanos commonly called each other mexicanos, or, with more direct reference to their New Mexico homeland, nuevomexicanos or neomexicanos. Appropriately, the first phase of the Spanish colonial revival set forth a new public identity. Between 1890 and 1920, “Mexicans” and mexicanos became “Spanish-Americans” and hispanoamericanos. Paralleling the change in ethnoracial labels was a shift in visual symbolism. By 1920 a Spanish colonial inheritance was front and center in a new style of architecture, one embodied in Santa Fe’s most prominent buildings. In the 1920s the revival took still another turn. Now honoring the lives of los paisanos, it presented the upper Rio Grande’s poorest citizens as a vibrant “Spanish culture.” It was at that point that Mary Austin and sympathetic Anglos, beguiled by notions of a Spanish folk culture, set out to preserve the agrarian village and defend it as a refuge from America’s “machine age.” Their actions had far-reaching significance. In helping to redefine the upper Rio Grande’s social character, they also advanced a new understanding of its place in twentieth-century America. To grasp the revival’s larger significance, one must first reflect on other commemorations of colonial Spain. As the nineteenth century came to a close, admirers from Santa Barbara to St. Augustine paid separate tribute to bygone days. The most exuberant praise arose in southern California, where, as in New Mexico, both Anglos and ethnic Mex-

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icans joined in. As prominent Spanish-speaking families proclaimed their descent from colonial settlers, Anglo tourist promoters, real estate speculators, and architects created a Spanish mission narrative, a paean to Franciscan missionaries. Scholarly studies of the California festivities have tended to characterize them as tributes to a “fantasy heritage,” a term Carey McWilliams coined in the 1940s to criticize a legacy that has ignored, obscured, or even erased the state’s Indian and Mexican past. One reason the fantasy label stuck involved the composition of California’s Spanish-speaking population: by 1900 few ethnic Mexicans could even claim descent from the state’s original Spanish settlers. Nor did turn-of-the-century Los Angeles and its environs favor homegrown traditions. The few surviving memories of colonial times were crowded out by the arrival of Mexican and Chinese immigrants, not to mention the much larger influx of Anglos. Uprooted and paved over, California’s Spanish colonial past could be commemorated but no longer lived.36 The revival on the upper Rio Grande bore superficial resemblance to events in California but followed a very different course. Although virtually all of New Mexico’s Hispanos were the offspring of racial mixing, most were at least indirectly descended from the mestizo Spanish settlers who set foot in New Mexico before 1821. And while New Mexican village folkways were not insulated from influences indigenous to Mexico and New Mexico, they remained far stronger than comparable folk practices on the West Coast. By 1900 the vitality of New Mexico’s paisano culture— expressed in a particular Spanish dialect, in lore, art, and Catholic custom—lent support to the claim that Spanish colonial tradition was alive and well on the upper Rio Grande. Even though that claim never seemed important to los paisanos themselves, the endurance and depth of their lore gave northern New Mexico’s Spanish revival an organic character lacking in southern California. Thus linked to a thriving Hispano culture, the modern Spanish heritage was always more than a fantasy heritage or a so-called invented tradition. Based on actual events and practices, it molded the Catholic ceremonies, artistic forms, and memories long preserved by Hispano families into a distinctive Spanish colonial inheritance, one that recognized but subordinated Mexican, Indian, and Anglo influences.37 No one has ever asked why the Spanish heritage took this form, or indeed why it emerged in the first place. Scholars have studied the matter only in narrow terms. Focusing separately on Hispano cultural traits, architecture, politics, manual arts, or literature, they have linked expressions of a Spanish legacy alternately to an enduring cultural identity, to efforts to construct a new ethnic identity, to Hispano political

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resistance, or to the designs of writers, art collectors, developers, and tourist promoters.38 While none of the explanations is untenable, each misses the big picture. Spanish heritage was remade not only by Anglos and Hispanos, but by artists, journalists, politicians, novelists, city boosters, educators, and even by relatively obscure Spanish-speaking farmers, weavers, and wood-carvers. These diverse groups were united less by a common political or social purpose—indeed their politics were often diametrically opposed—than by a familiar “problem”: the lurking image of the impoverished, footloose, and dark-complexioned Mexican. The “Mexican,” in this case, was less a real person than a trope, the same figure of meaning evoked by Katharine Gerould. It was itself a symbol that brought anxieties over racial impurity, backwardness, and social instability into a recognizable but malleable body. Common enough throughout the Southwest, the disparaging image hit New Mexico especially hard. Even though Mexican immigrants were relatively rare on the upper Rio Grande, the demographic dominance of poor and unschooled Hispanos exposed New Mexico to claims of backwardness and racial impurity. In other areas of the Southwest, Anglos and elite Hispanos responded to their “Mexican problem” by setting themselves apart from the ethnic Mexican working class, distinguishing themselves as white leaders of migrant farmers and day laborers.39 Elite New Mexicans did not have that luxury, for their towns and villages were indelibly marked by the lives of los paisanos. Rather than take flight, participants in the revival therefore redefined the upper Rio Grande’s herders and farmers as descendants of Spanish colonists, thereby walling them off from Mexican immigrants. Whereas California’s “fantasy heritage” drew a sharp line between the Anglo elite and the Mexican masses, Spanish heritage on the upper Rio Grande transcended the Mexican image by redefining the paisano character. If the revival could not make los paisanos “white,” it nonetheless offered a way of talking about and perceiving them as a people suffused with a Spanish colonial past.40 The revival’s inclusive spirit was not born of altruism. On the contrary, admirers of los paisanos were acting very much in their own interests. Their aim was to elevate their own stature and comfort by ridding their state, their towns, and their neighborhoods of the Mexican image. In some cases status had a material dimension. Tourist promoters and merchants, primarily Anglo, profited from the trade in so-called Spanish colonial art, and boosters deployed Spanish symbols to attract wellto-do visitors. Likewise, Anglo investors believed that the Mexican image retarded economic development and undercut efforts to present

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New Mexico as a progressive American state. But the profit motive is only one piece of the puzzle. Some Anglos, leaders of political, educational, and cultural institutions, stood to enhance their stature less by making money than by remaking northern New Mexico before a local and national audience. Similarly, by the twenties and thirties, Anglo writers and art patrons found the seemingly medieval “Spanish” villager more agreeable to work with, write about, and live among than a population of no-account “Mexicans.” Prominent Hispanos had yet another motive. Faced with diminishing fortunes and political sway, they sought to cement their positions as leaders of a distinctive Spanishspeaking culture, one made up of people wholly unlike the Mexican immigrant. Although proud of their distance from los paisanos, elite Hispanos nonetheless recognized in the Anglo threat the need to cast themselves as the leaders of a unified Spanish culture.41 In short, both elite Hispanos and Anglos found it worthwhile to live with the imagined legacy of colonial Spain. In spite of very evident differences of race, wealth, language, religion, and politics, they were eager to transcend their “Mexican” burdens by embracing a redemptive past.42 As the revival moved through its several phases, so too did the colonial heritage it articulated. The changing array of people and events over four decades corresponded to a shifting focus of commemoration: from the capital city to the remote village, from Spanish hero to humble settler, and from the glory of conquest to the pride of perseverance. Perhaps the best synoptic view of the changes may be had through the prism of gender. Between 1900 and 1940 celebrations of masculine conquistadors and missionaries gave way to feminine imagery of the humble villager. After 1920, as the spotlight fell on village lore, arts, and religious ceremony, the revival increasingly involved women, both as enthusiasts and as objects of admiration. Male villagers were also featured prominently, notably as artisans and religious penitents, yet they too took on a domesticated feminine character. The benign and homespun persona of the village wood-carver stood out against male figures past and present. Far from the military bearing of the Spanish conquistador, the kindly Hispano carver was also conveniently distant from the figure, common throughout the Southwest, of the Mexican migrant. The more the revival presented the lives of real and potentially undesirable people, the more it embraced a feminized Hispano character. To trace those and other changes, I offer the following six chapters. In roughly chronological order they recount how Spanish heritage was fashioned and transformed between 1900 and 1940. Chapter 1 reviews

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the events that led up to the revival. Exploring the evolution of Spanish-speaking society, it presents the mix of Hispano gains and losses that made the revival possible. The next two chapters, treating the rise of Spanish colonial imagery in party politics (chapter 2) and in architectural design (chapter 3), recount efforts to mask the poverty and apparent backwardness of los paisanos by abstracting their lives into symbols of Spanish grandeur. In political rhetoric, it was the figure of the conquistador who embodied Spanish glory; in the architectural medium, the ideal of civility and progress was best expressed through the deeds of the Franciscan missionary. The shift toward a celebration of the actual lives of los paisanos, along with the waning of masculinity, is described in the next three chapters. Chapter 4 looks at La Fiesta de Santa Fe, a festival whose largely Anglo leaders decided in the late 1920s that real villagers, not stage pageantry, should be the main attraction. Not by coincidence, warm tributes to village folkways took place as women began to play a bigger role in the revival, both as participants and as admired agents of Spanish colonial domesticity. In honoring the villagers, the revivalists, both men and women, grew particularly enamored of their so-called Spanish colonial arts, the handmade crafts that came to be emblematic of an enduring Spanish tradition. Chapter 5 explores how manual arts were seen, rather quixotically, as a means of both preserving the folk from modern America and integrating them into a regional economy. Chapter 6 takes up the mismatch between folklore and modern economic imperatives by examining the literature of Spanish heritage in the 1920s and 1930s. It examines how southwestern writers, by treating Hispano lore as a defense against twentieth-century America, depicted the villagers as a people outside the flow of history, a people without political significance. The changing portrayals of Hispano life and culture lead ultimately to the question of consequences. It is quite clear that the Spanish revival offered Hispanos few material rewards. Not even the few craftspeople who gained national attention were able to cash in on their fame. One might even speculate that the modern Spanish heritage actually aggravated Hispano poverty. By putting tradition above material need, it may well have retarded the already slow pace of economic development in northern New Mexico.43 That claim, although not unreasonable, is not made in this book, for my concern has less to do with economic than cultural consequences, that is, how the revival changed perceptions of Hispano New Mexico. Today, many residents of the upper Rio Grande, Hispano and Anglo alike, undoubtedly regard those consequences fa-

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vorably. After all, by 1940, even as the Spanish revival began to lose vigor, it had enabled its admirers to depict northern New Mexico’s large Spanish-speaking population as white and civilized and thereby to claim that the old line of racial division between “Americans” and “Mexicans” had been redrawn into a circle of inclusion. Compared to other regions of the United States, northern New Mexico has enjoyed a remarkable degree of racial cooperation, cooperation that the modern Spanish heritage has surely promoted. Before one wholly accepts that line of argument, however, it is wise to return to Katharine Gerould’s view of New Mexico. Gerould, it is safe to say, took little interest in Hispano culture. Although she sympathized with elite families, she dismissed los paisanos out of hand. In place of curiosity or sensitivity, she bore an unthinking prejudice. What she did comprehend was the Anglo-American domination of the Southwest. More clearly than Mary Austin and the Santa Fe literati, she recognized how far the newcomers had already penetrated into New Mexico and sensed how much farther they were destined to go. That their ascendancy paralleled the rise of Spanish heritage is no coincidence. Although the newcomers drew their power from the control of votes, industries, and commerce, they derived legitimacy from the understanding that true equality was granted only to those recognized as white, propertied, and civilized. The Spanish colonial revival, wrapping los paisanos in the trappings of an admired past, was at heart a crusade to recast Hispano New Mexico in like terms. This book recounts the course and clear limits of that aspiration.

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chapter 1

Hispano Fortunes in New Mexico, 1598 –1900 I was born here, but they used to tell me that my greatgrandfathers had come from Spain. That is on both sides, my mom’s and my dad’s. Here afterwards they must have married gente mezclada [people of mixed blood], I don’t know for sure. At first it was all Spaniards that came. Manuel Martínez, age eighty-five, Las Vegas Oral Histories, 1975

Long before the first stirrings of a Spanish colonial revival, a Spanishspeaking culture was felt and expressed in everyday life. Religious customs and ceremonies, techniques of labor and craftsmanship, local history and lore—all bespoke the continuity of Hispano generations on the upper Rio Grande. Among the more important expressions was the act of marriage. As it brought together bride and groom, a New Mexican marriage also signified fidelity to local Catholic tradition. It involved two families in a precise sequence of rituals: the request for the bride’s hand; an acceptance after a set period; the prendorio, or gathering to celebrate the betrothal; a second prendorio to exchange gifts; and the culminating procession to the wedding chapel. Meaningful in themselves, the rituals also served a crucial social purpose. They signified the continuity and, ideally, the enhancement of a family’s status, particularly when bride and groom were members of the Spanish-speaking gentry. Having built fortunes in ranching and trade, los ricos used marriages to secure their present and future influence. A proper marriage, 20

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bringing new life into a family, also excluded the spouse of unsuitable social status.1 One of the most celebrated weddings of its time took place on July 27, 1898, in the town of Taos. The bride, Cleofas Martínez, was the daughter of the Rio Arriba’s most prominent Spanish-speaking family. In 1832 her great-grandfather had gained control of the Tierra Amarilla Grant, an expanse of land later patented at more than half a million acres. Her grandfather Vicente had moved the family to its present home in Arroyo Hondo, a village just north of Taos, where he established a profitable overland trade with agents in Colorado and Kansas. Her father, Julián, took only twenty years to turn a small store into a thriving land and stock company. The stature of the Martínez family demanded no less of a groom than Cleofas’s betrothed, Venceslao Jaramillo. The scion of another great Rio Arriba family and aide to New Mexico territorial governor Miguel Antonio Otero, Jaramillo was elected to the territorial legislature before he turned twenty-one, and he later chaired New Mexico’s Republican Party. Joined together, Cleofas Martínez and Venceslao Jaramillo thus represented the consolidation of Hispano power in the Rio Arriba. In the 1930s Cleofas’s brother Reyes remembered their marriage as an example of how families of “Spanish stock” conserved their traditions and kept their blood “pure.” Weddings like theirs, he wrote, “served to preserve unimpaired the refinement and culture of these families, which still distinguishes them from the rest of the population of New Mexico.” 2 Yet even in this marriage, so emblematic of generational continuity, one finds signs of change. Although Julián Martínez offered his daughter’s hand without consulting her, Cleofas and Venceslao had corresponded freely for several years before 1898. Moreover, Venceslao mailed an engagement ring to his bride before receiving her father’s answer, and he decided to skip the formal prendorio altogether. The couple’s correspondence is also suggestive. In 1898 Spanish was still the standard language for Hispanos and the only means of communicating with family elders. Thus the couple’s wedding invitation was printed in Spanish. Yet Venceslao wrote to Cleofas in English, signing his notes “Ben.” 3 If his facility with the new language was invaluable for a young associate of Governor Otero, it was also a harbinger of the new Anglo-American order. By 1898, eighteen years after locomotives pulled into Santa Fe, Anglos were rapidly moving into the territory, acquiring land, displacing Hispano commerce, controlling the courts, and withal undermining the gentry’s social foundation. Cleofas Jaramillo was only one of the

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more prominent figures to suffer the consequences. After her husband’s untimely death in 1920, she despaired of competing with the Anglos, whom she knew as “this quick, business-like race.” Forced to sell off Venceslao’s ranch, she took up a dispiriting life in Santa Fe. Her one hope of recovery lay in the symbols of the past. In the mid-1930s, reflecting on her own losses and those of rico families and casting herself as a “descendent of the Spanish pioneers,” she set out to resurrect the social customs of her childhood. Publishing her memoirs and appearing at public events, she took on new stature as an authority on Spanish folkways, a stature made possible by her family lineage yet inspired by her wish to transcend the tragic “passing of the old Spanish customs.” 4 The tale of Cleofas Jaramillo takes its place in the larger history of Hispano society on the upper Rio Grande, a history of flowering and decline that gave rise to the Spanish revival. When twentieth-century Hispanos like Jaramillo reflected on olden days, they relied on the shared ideal of español, the ideal that had first set Christian settlers apart from New Mexico’s Indians. After 1821, even as Spanish rule of New Mexico gave way to Mexican and American administrations, the stage was being set for the rebirth of a Spanish colonial past. During the middle decades of the nineteenth century, as English-speaking newcomers trickled into the new American territory, Hispanos continued to build a formidable Spanish-speaking society, one strong enough to forestall the coming influx of Anglo capital and migrants. After 1880, as Anglos steadily accumulated wealth, dismembered land grants, and gained secure foot-holds in political parties, they could not wholly dislodge their rivals. Sustained by their land, votes, and Catholic traditions, Hispanos refused to give way. Only after 1900, when they saw their influence slipping away, did ricos like Cleofas Jaramillo reach backward in time for the symbols of redemption. Although Anglos, too, traded in Spanish symbolism and frequently directed the events of the Spanish revival, their actions would not have been possible, or even dreamed of, in the absence of a powerful, vibrant, yet always beleaguered Spanish-speaking society.

Español and Indio in Colonial New Mexico Spanish colonial memories at the end of the nineteenth century were primarily the stuff of family history. Like the Martínezes and Jaramillos, the Lunas, Oteros, Chaveses, Bacas, Pinos, Sándovals, and Armijos fondly recalled the lives of their ancestors, particularly those who first

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established the family line in New Mexico. One of the few pioneers all families could honor in common was the illustrious Don Juan de Oñate, the wealthy conquistador who founded the first permanent Spanish colony on the upper Rio Grande. Moving northward from central Mexico in 1598, Oñate led 129 soldiers and several hundred colonists— women, servants, children, and friars—to the crossing of the river near present-day El Paso. As he continued upstream, he stopped long enough at Pueblo communities to proclaim the dominion of Spain and, so it was reported, to hear the voluntary submission of Indian leaders. He ended his journey at Ohke, a native village at the river’s fertile confluence with the Rio Chama. Renaming it San Juan, his party occupied its dwellings before moving to a more spacious village, San Gabriel, across the river. Oñate was not the first Spaniard to explore New Mexico, nor were San Juan and San Gabriel its first Spanish settlements. But as the first royally sanctioned colonizing expedition to the northern frontier, his campaign took on lasting significance. It distinguished him in Hispano memory as the bearer of Christian civilization to a primitive and godless land.5 However uncivilized they considered their hosts, Oñate and the settlers quickly discovered a high degree of social complexity. Indians on the upper Rio Grande lived within an intricate and often-changing web of kinship, trading, and warfare. In time the settlers and their descendants acquired enough knowledge of the local Navajos, Apaches, and Comanches to trade and fight effectively. The more immediate goal in 1598 was to colonize the relatively sedentary Pueblo peoples. Numbering roughly fifty thousand, the Pueblos inhabited more than one hundred agricultural villages, most of which lay in the Rio Grande watershed, either adjacent to tributaries or alongside the river itself. Set amid irrigated fields, the villages were compactly built and often contained two- or even three-storied adobe houses. The arrangement favored colonial aims, for it concentrated a potentially far-flung agricultural population in a manageable number of settlements. At the same time, the independence of the villages hindered Spanish control. Small in population—none contained more than two thousand residents—they were independently organized and governed. Even communication was difficult. Scattered across New Spain’s northern frontier, the Pueblo people spoke four or five mutually unintelligible languages, each of which had several dialects. Few Spaniards ever mastered them.6 The only way to overcome such obstacles was spiritual conversion. Occupied with colonial ventures throughout the Americas, the Spanish Crown was unwilling to commit the manpower or resources for a mili-

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tary conquest of so unpromising a region as New Mexico. Nor was a military campaign even permitted under Spanish law. In 1573 Felipe II had issued the Ordinances of Discovery, a set of directives calling for the peaceful settlement of Indian lands by Catholic missionaries. In a departure from the warfare that left Indians decimated and enslaved across central Mexico, the new policy directed crusaders of the Cross to protect and minister to native peoples. The holy campaign was to be led by the Franciscan brotherhood, a lay religious order that sought to save Indian souls as it built a Christian dominion. Pressed aggressively in New Mexico, the crusade achieved striking results. By 1629 the Franciscans had supervised the construction of fifty mission churches in Pueblo villages and had converted, at least by outward appearance, roughly fifty thousand Indians. The brotherhood’s belief that spiritual paradise was close at hand remained unshaken even by moments of violent resistance. Those friars who survived a hostile encounter were said to be under divine protection; those who did not, attained a glorious martyrdom.7 In theory, all agencies of Spanish power worked in concert to enlarge the Franciscan fold. Having committed themselves to a life of poverty, the friars relied on alms from the Crown in the form of tools, supplies, and ceremonial articles. If the Crown did not always embrace the brotherhood’s spiritual aims, it recognized their importance in turning the Pueblos into productive, taxpaying citizens. It therefore sanctioned soldiers to keep Indian neophytes from leaving the mission or deviating from their Christian commitments. As the seventeenth century progressed, however, the cooperation of government, soldiers, and missionaries broke down. At issue was the control of native bodies. The Franciscans argued that Indians would never be civilized unless they worked in the missions. The friars also knew that no mission could operate without them. For their part, Spanish settlers claimed a share of Indian labor and its produce as an encomienda, a privilege rewarded by the Crown in return for public service. The Indians were further exploited by Spanish governors. Forced to buy their office from the Crown, the governors considered Pueblo labor the best means of recouping a risky investment.8 The question of labor, of course, was not simply a Spanish concern. As the sixteenth century wore on, the Pueblos grew increasingly restive. A host of social and environmental factors compounded the burdens imposed by the settlers. One was the loss of land. Although Spanish law protected Indian claims, lax administration enabled the settlers to encroach on the most fertile soil. Drought and European diseases also

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took their toll, reducing crop yields and causing the Pueblo population to fall to an estimated seventeen thousand in 1679. As the Indians struggled to meet the demands of the encomienda, the dwindling tribute pushed more and more Spaniards into farming and onto Pueblo land. Meanwhile, bands of Apaches stepped up their raids on Pueblo communities to seize the crops and livestock they could no longer acquire through trade. The vise grip of factors pressed the natives inexorably toward their decision, in 1680, to strike out against the roughly twentyfive hundred people living in the province’s Spanish households. Driving the vulnerable settlers down the Rio Grande, back to present-day El Paso, the Pueblo Revolt thereafter reminded Spanish colonizers of the special challenges of the upper Rio Grande.9 Partly in response to the uprising, Spain rethought its strategy. After Don Diego de Vargas retook New Mexico forcibly in 1693, the Crown adopted a more conciliatory approach. Rather than coerce conversions and exploit Indian labor, colonial authorities agreed to steer clear of Pueblo land and religious practices. The new strategy was designed to create an internally stable province, one resistant to Pueblo insurrection and strong enough to ward off French adventurers, as well as their Apache and Comanche trading partners, on the colony’s northern and eastern borders.10 The key to the strategy was disposable land. Lacking the resources to turn New Mexico into a defensive garrison, the Crown viewed the province’s fields and pastures as a means of peopling the frontier. Having long rewarded exemplary soldiers and officials with huge tracts along the Rio Grande, the Crown opted to grant remaining parcels not held by the Pueblos to petitioning settlers, thereby building communities that could deter or defend against a hostile advance. Over the next twelve decades, Spanish authorities issued 113 grants, a total of 7,294,190 acres.11 The task of attracting settlers in sufficient numbers prompted the Crown to look favorably on large groups of landless or land-poor households. To draw them to the frontier, it conferred both community and private grants. Recipients of a community grant received their own houses and farming lots, as well as the right to use common pastures and forests. Private grants, though typically conferred on a single individual or family, came to function like community grants, for to promote development, the single recipient usually offered settlers separate lots as well as the rights to gather wood and graze livestock.12 The result in both cases was a considerable degree of economic and social independence. Access to fields and pastures created rare opportunities for

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farmers, herders, and, less directly, shoemakers, wool weavers, and other artisans. A measure of their success is the 1790 census of New Mexico, the most detailed demographic picture of the colonial period. It revealed that individually employed farmers and artisans made up the majority of New Mexico’s Spanish-speaking residents. In the villa of Alburquerque, for example, almost half of the labor force were employed as artisans. Fewer than one in five were day laborers or servants. Farmers and artisans did not, of course, live under gracious circumstances. Most paisanos dwelled in crude adobe or log houses that lacked beds or even chairs. But unlike workers in other parts of Spanish America, many possessed or permanently occupied a parcel of land. They would not easily let it go.13 The same frontier environment that favored humble farmers and artisans often frustrated the regional gentry. In nominal terms, New Mexico’s fifteen to twenty most prominent families enjoyed a status not unlike the elite of central Mexico. In return for service to the Crown, heads of families received noble titles and were recognized as superior under Spanish law. Each of the soldiers in Oñate’s 1598 expedition, for example, earned at least the noble rank of hidalgo. As noblemen, hidalgos were exempt from taxes and could not be arrested for debt. Most important, they could pass on their title to a male heir.14 In terms of riches, however, even the province’s most elevated families fell short of nobles elsewhere in Spanish America. Distant from central Mexico and lacking precious metals or valued produce, the gentry was hard pressed to multiply its wealth or exchange it for goods. The only source of finished products, not to speak of luxury items, was the laborious overland trade with Nueva Vizcaya and Mexico City. After transportation costs, middlemen, and duties, the colonists paid exorbitant prices and received a poor return on their own agricultural exports. And unlike settlers in Florida and Texas, New Mexicans were too isolated from waterways to benefit from ever-present smugglers.15 The cumulative result is illustrated by the will of a woman who died in 1762. At her death Juana Luján was worth some six thousand pesos, a value that placed her in the upper ranks of New Mexican society. Her Santa Cruz estate included a house of twenty-four rooms and numerous religious artifacts. Yet furnishings in her house were limited to a bed, a cabinet, a chest, two benches, and a writing desk. Nothing adorned her walls save a single mirror and elkhide paintings.16 Elite New Mexicans did enjoy one absolute advantage over their humbler countrymen: they owned and traded Indian slaves. On New

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Mexico’s dry highlands, the slave was both a reliable source of profit and a sign of social status. Although the enslavement of Indians had been outlawed in Spanish colonies since 1542, it was largely overlooked by New Mexican authorities, particularly when it involved Indians deemed hostile. Thus Don Diego de Vargas enslaved the four hundred women and children who resisted his reconquest of Santa Fe in 1693. In the eighteenth century, slave taking was modified to suit the Crown’s new colonization policy. Just as Pueblo land claims were honored—though more in principle than in practice—the Pueblo people themselves were largely left alone. The same dispensation was denied so-called indios bárbaros, the nomadic Navajos, Apaches, Utes, and Comanches. Either captured during skirmishes or acquired through trade, many of the nomadic Indians were then sold to Mexican silver mines. Others, sometimes presented as wedding gifts, were put to work in New Mexican homes. Known as genízaros, the domestic servants were baptized and often adopted by Spanish-speaking families. Although some captives remained in service of Spanish families for life, others, emancipated at their majority, moved to the northern frontier and gradually assimilated into Spanish-speaking villages.17 As a symbol of hybridity, genízaros played a crucial role in defining social differences. Representing the lowest and most dishonorable stratum of colonial society, genízaros stood in counterpoint to españoles, the people of highest status. In 1598 the line between español and indio was abundantly clear. Most of the 129 soldiers of the Oñate expedition were Spanish peninsulares or criollos. Over the next eight decades, however, the intermixing of Spaniards and Indians yielded a society in which nine in ten citizens were native born and few if any could claim limpieza de sangre. In the melting pot of New Mexico, the presence of genízaros helped to define español as a marker of refinement.18 Reliance on this marker only grew after the reconquest of 1693. In theory, ecclesiastical and civil authorities throughout Spanish America were charged with classifying colonists by casta, their official ethnoracial rank. Under one such system, the child of an español and an indio was a mestizo; of mestizo and indio, a castizo; of español and negra, a mulato; of negro and indio, a lobo, and so on.19 In practice, the finely tuned system often collapsed on the New Mexico frontier. As landowning citizens, mestizo or castizo settlers were emboldened to proclaim themselves españoles. At the same time, overworked officials employed only the most general categories of description. In 1776, for example, Friar Francisco Atanasio Domínguez found only Spanish and genízaro families in Santa Fe. A

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similar report on the village of Pecos in 1800 described “indios and españoles and people of other classes.” It does appear that the casta system was sometimes imposed with more regularity, perhaps because, as one historian has argued, the gentry sought to keep close track of whom its sons and daughters married. In any event, it was the presence of Indians in Spanish-speaking society that anchored perceptions of social status. For both peasant and aristocrat, the indio was the racial benchmark that made meaningful the familiar ideal of español. 20 Whatever satisfaction it offered Spanish settlers, of course, the claim of español was of little help in the daily struggle to survive. And for the better part of the colonial era, life in New Mexico remained very much a struggle. One indication of the province’s difficulties was its shape and size. Although theoretically New Mexico reached from the Great Plains to the Colorado River, almost all of the roughly twenty-five hundred colonists in 1680 resided in a thin corridor along the Rio Grande between Taos and Socorro. The majority lived in Santa Fe or in the downriver settlements of the Rio Abajo, for want of labor and protection next to Pueblo villages. The province fared little better in the first half of the eighteenth century. Although the Crown’s more liberal land policy drew settlers into the fertile uplands of the Rio Arriba, leading to the founding of such villages as Santa Cruz, Chimayo, and Taos, New Mexico’s overall population remained relatively small. In 1753 only 3,402 members of Spanish households were counted in the sixteen settlements of central and northern New Mexico. While the province was never economically stagnant, too often its distance from central Mexico and its thin base of natural resources outweighed the allure of the land grant. Particularly discouraging to potential settlers were the rising number of Indian depredations. At first Apache and then Comanche raiders held settlers at bay in the Rio Arriba, sometimes causing the abandonment of entire villages, and they kept the colonization of the Rio Abajo confined largely to the river corridor.21 Fortunes brightened in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. As part of the Bourbon reforms, the Crown proposed yet another frontier strategy. To stem the constant loss of revenue from Indian wars, provincial officials pacified nomadic tribes with a combination of force, gifts, and tactical alliances. The strategy resulted in a lasting peace with Comanche raiders in 1786 and a temporary truce with Apache bands a few years later. The cessation of the constant and vicious warfare of earlier decades, coupled with rising demand for New Mexican products in the silver-mining regions of Mexico, enabled Hispano society to grow

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rapidly and expand beyond the confines of the Rio Grande Valley. Between 1776 and 1790 the non-Indian population of interior New Mexico doubled to roughly sixteen thousand. In 1817 it reached some twenty-seven thousand. As their numbers increased, settlers in search of open land broke away from parent villages and established new settlements far from the main river. Spreading outward from Santa Fe, Taos, and Santa Cruz, they created communities such as San Miguel del Vado (ca. 1803), Arroyo Hondo (1815), and Vallecitos (1824). By the 1860s they had founded the first villages of Colorado, and their settlements stretched from the Texas panhandle to Arizona (see map 2).22 Closer to New Mexico’s demographic core, the gains in population created an ever more diverse province. Along with its gradations of wealth and race, New Mexico was marked by the increasingly distinctive cultures of the Rio Arriba and the Rio Abajo. The differences arose in large part from an unequal pace of development: compared to the Rio Abajo, the upriver region remained poor and primitive. By 1800, although it accounted for a greater share of New Mexico’s population, the Rio Arriba produced a minor part of the province’s wealth.23 The sluggishness had several causes. First, the Rio Arriba’s remote and scattered villages had always invited Indian attacks. Burned crops and stolen livestock devastated whole families and convinced many of their neighbors to move downriver. The second problem was ecology. Despite numerous streams, lush meadows, and stands of timber, agriculture in the Rio Arriba suffered from a short growing season and irregular farming plots. With much of the best agricultural land held by the Pueblos, Spanish settlers were often left with narrow fields in rugged mountain valleys. The picturesque parcels could hardly match the productive output of the large downriver estates that sprawled across gently sloping bottomland. The third problem was trade. Before the opening of the Santa Fe Trail in 1821, Chihuahua trading caravans supplied virtually all of the province’s manufactured goods and departed with most of its agricultural exports. Settlers of the Rio Arriba, situated at the end of the trade route, stood at a commercial disadvantage. Through their own barter with native tribes, they were able to acquire hides, Indian slaves, and the occasional French firearm, all of which could be exchanged for finished products moving north from central Mexico. Yet the terms of the exchange lay beyond their control. Exploited by Rio Abajo middlemen, who were in turn manipulated by the Chihuahua merchants, few Rio Arriba dwellers could afford the imported tools, clothing, religious icons, and furniture that more readily reached the downriver settlers.24 The unique challenges of the Rio Arriba have tempted many

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Chama

Los Pinos

Rio C h a m

Largo (ca 1870 – 80)

Moses

Questa (ca. 1842)

Taos Rayado El Rito (1851) (early 1700s) a Ojo Caliente (1735) Bueyeros Abiquiu (1754) Trampas (1751) Cuba Santa Cruz Mora (ca. 1816) Mosquero (1695) R. Sapello ez Gallegos Maes Sabinoso Santa Fe Las Vegas (1835) Trujillo (1610) Trementina San Miguel La Cueva del Vado (1800) C a n a d i a n R iv e r Anton Chico Bernalillo

Rive r

Jem

San J uan

Costilla (1849)

Tierra Amarilla (ca. 1840 –50)

San Mateo (1862) San Rafael

Albuquerque (1706) Los Lunas (1716)

iv e

Belen (ca. 1740)

sR co Pe r

Puerco Rio

Atarque

Cebolleta (1849)

Sabinal (1770s)

Rio Grand e

Socorro (ca. 1740)

0

50 Miles

m ap 2. Hispano settlement and areal expansion

twentieth-century observers to envision upriver settlers as a wholly separate subculture, a people whose rustic folkways had little in common with the more cosmopolitan Rio Abajo. That perception is not baseless, but it underestimates the ties between the two regions. Along with the bonds of family and trade, settlers throughout New Mexico were united by a deep Catholic faith. For rich and poor alike, Catholicism embed-

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ded the individual in a tightly organized community. Separating Christian paisanos from New Mexico’s indios bárbaros, it reminded the settlers who they were and who they were not. It is certainly true that boundaries between Indians and Spanish-speaking settlers were sometimes porous. Particularly on New Mexico’s far northern frontier, trade, cultural borrowing, and intermarriage softened sharp racial edges.25 Yet no one should underestimate the degrees of distrust and outright fear that marked the settler-Indian relationship. An illustrative case in point is an oral history of the 1830 founding of Questa, a village north of Taos. According to this account, retold in 1936, the founders of Questa relied on Indian slaves to clear their prospective townsite of brush and timber. Then, after building a church to honor San Antonio, their patron saint, the settlers celebrated a fiesta to honor him, just as they observed other Christian feast days throughout the year. To guard against Apache and Ute attacks, the ceremonies were always attended by armed men, and farmers never worked their fields without guns and powder at hand. That sense of mortal danger is reinforced by a second, more graphic account of life in northern New Mexico. Before she died in 1901, Tomasita Benavides recalled the everyday confrontations in El Llano de San Juan, a settlement founded in 1780 by her ancestors. Benavides remembered how “bloodthirsty natives” (indijenas sanguinarios) in search of food and young Spanish-speaking captives delighted in killing and scalping the village’s “civilized folks” (personas civilisadas). “These Indians,” she told her daughter, “being as they were murderously inclined, when they did seize any civilized person, would kill him and remove his skin from the eyebrows up, removing scalp and hair.” 26 A Catholic identity, shaped by perceptions of native savagery, sharpened the boundary between nomadic Indians and Spanish-speaking settlers. As much as trade and intermarriage blurred lines of racial division, Catholicism reinforced the limits of the Christian community. But it always did much more than that. As a set of daily rituals, Catholicism lent rhythm to lives spent in fields and pastures. As a form of knowledge, it helped settlers to interpret the strange events and people they encountered. And as the source of transcendental belief, it enabled them to overcome hardships and tragic losses. It did not, of course, make the settlers into saints. Provincial officials frequently condemned New Mexicans for excessive gambling, witchcraft, and lewd dances. In the 1780s the Franciscan father Juan Agustín de Morfi expressed dismay on observing “moral disorders . . . which shock even the barbarous Indians.” Nor was it easy to practice Catholic belief in New Mexico. As the

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Spanish-speaking population increased after 1750, the number of provincial clergy steadily fell. In his 1812 report to the newly established Spanish Congress, Pedro Bautista Pino noted that no bishop had set foot in the province in over fifty years, leaving most of the faithful unconfirmed. The scarcity of regular clergy prevented many parishioners from even hearing mass.27 Yet with or without clerical guidance, an Hispano-Catholic culture flourished. Settlers created their own objects of worship and practiced their own rituals. Religious dramas, such as Las Posadas and Los Pastores, recalled the birth of Christ. An elaborate lore of hymns, verses, and allegories testified to the fragility of daily life and the strength of religious faith. Throughout the year settlers held fiestas in honor of saints, whose sculpted or painted images, known as santos, they bore in somber processions. The settlers expressed special devotion to Nuestra Señora del Rosario, La Conquistadora, an image of the Virgin Mary that accompanied Don Diego de Vargas on his mission to New Mexico in 1692 and was henceforth honored as the spiritual leader of the reconquest. By the end of the eighteenth century, La Conquistadora had effectively become the province’s patron saint.28 For settlers who never ventured to Santa Fe, local craftsmen known as santeros carved and painted images to replace those formerly brought from Spain or Mexico. Disregarding the formal baroque style of the imports, the rough-hewn craft of the santero articulated a humble yet fervent devotion to God. Perhaps the most dramatic embodiment of that faith was La Cofradía de Nuestro Padre Jesús Nazareno, the confraternity better known as Los Penitentes. Renowned mainly for their penance during the Christian Holy Week, the confraternity ministered throughout the year to the spiritual and material needs of New Mexico’s remote villages. Flourishing in the absence of the formal Church, it has persisted, in diminished form, up to the present day. It remains the most prominent expression of an enduring Hispano culture on the upper Rio Grande.29 What remains in question is whether that Hispano culture bears a distinctively Spanish colonial character. The question is difficult to answer, for in some form each of Spain’s former colonies retains Iberian traces. Throughout the Americas the Spanish impress was mediated, filtered, and resisted in varied ways. Seen from one angle, New Mexico appears to have preserved its Spanish characteristics to a greater extent than neighboring borderland areas. Its initial group of Spanishspeaking migrants, living in the relative isolation of the northern frontier, became a relatively insular provincial society and fostered a unique

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culture, one of peculiar archaic dialects, Iberian folk arts, and devotion to Spanish icons. For example, while Hispanos have always paid homage to the patron saint of Mexico, Our Lady of Guadalupe, they reserve special sentiment for La Conquistadora. And among the Penitente Brotherhood, great reverence is felt for Nuestra Señora de los Dolores, a figure associated with Iberian influence.30 Viewed from a different perspective, colonial New Mexico appears as simply one province among several in New Spain, little different from those that remained part of Mexico. The opposition of español and indio was certainly not unique to New Mexico, nor was a devout Catholic faith. Moreover, by 1750 or so the Spanish character borne by Oñate and Vargas had long since been diluted. Far less peninsular or criollo than mestizo, the major part of each generation was henceforth indigenous to New Mexico.31 Seen from still another viewpoint, the distinctiveness of Spanish-speaking New Mexico seems less a consequence of Spanish conquest than a result of an economic boom in the province long after the conquistadors had departed.32 Thus the debate continues. Rather than rehearse or adjudicate it, I wish to shift attention to a related but distinct phenomenon, the revival of Spanish colonial symbolism after 1900. My purpose is to figure out why someone like Cleofas Jaramillo reflected so fondly on the imagery of colonial times and brought it into modern-day prominence. To begin to understand her and other motives, one must consider what happened to Hispano New Mexico in the nineteenth century.

Hispano Ascent and Anglo Challenge Far from accidental, the privations of Spanish colonial New Mexico resulted from a policy to channel wealth to the mother country. The Crown held a monopoly over articles of everyday use, prohibiting local production and sale of such items as salt and tobacco. It imposed heavy taxes on all merchandise imported to the province. And in funneling goods through the port of Veracruz, it enabled Mexican merchants in Chihauhau to exercise their own monopoly over trade with the northern frontier. This third restraint caused the greatest hardship. Lacking hard currency and paying exorbitant prices for the most basic merchandise, New Mexicans were forced to buy on credit at ruinous terms. In some cases they had to mortgage their export crops up to six years in advance. Although the calming of Indian conflicts and the development of long-distance trade late in the colonial period allowed for consider-

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able economic growth, the commercial predicament was not easy to escape. In 1807, when U.S. Army Lt. Zebulon Pike returned from his reconnaissance of the Southwest, he brought good news to American merchants: Hispano traders earned only two pesos (roughly $2) per hundred pounds of flour and one peso per head of sheep but paid $4 for a yard of linen and $20 for fine cloth. As a result, New Mexico was virtually devoid of such basic items as imported clothing, metal tools, and books. In the eyes of Yankee traders, it was a market ripe for the picking.33 The American traders got their chance in 1821, the year of Mexican independence. Two months after Spain’s departure, William Becknell arrived in New Mexico with the first officially sanctioned load of goods to traverse the Santa Fe Trail. Unlike Spanish authorities, the Mexican government was eager to do business with the Americans, in part because it badly needed revenue from import duties. As wagon trains rolled into Santa Fe, New Mexicans found themselves with a cornucopia of high-quality goods costing as little as one-third the Chihauhau price. Too poor to absorb the offerings, Hispanos were literally overwhelmed. By 1824 the New Mexico market was already saturated, and the American wagon trains continued south, down the Camino Real and into the more populated silver-mining regions of central Mexico. Yet the new trading route had its beneficial effect. Availing Hispano merchants of low-cost goods, the Santa Fe Trail broke the Chihauhau monopoly. New Mexicans could now receive decent returns on their own products, as well as payment in hard currency. In some cases they even purchased merchandise from American merchants in New Mexico and sold it profitably in Chihauhau and Durango. They began to realize the rewards of a growing export economy.34 The foundation of that economy was sheep. Brought to New Mexico as early as 1540, sheep were permanently introduced by the Oñate expedition fifty-eight years later. Spanish settlers discovered that a small but sturdy breed flourished in New Mexico’s dry climate and high tableland. Profits began to materialize at the end of the eighteenth century. In response to rising demand for wool and mutton in the Mexican silver mines, as well as in Durango, Guadalajara, and even Mexico City, ranchers drove thousands of animals southward each year during the last two decades of Spanish rule. With the loosening of trade barriers in 1821, the size of the exports grew considerably, with as many as one hundred thousand reaching Mexico in 1835. By 1850 New Mexico had the largest number of sheep in the western United States. For the most part, the

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trade rewarded economies of scale. The expense of husbanding and driving the animals left just three families (the Chávezes, Oteros, and Sándovals) with control of more than three-fifths of all sheep sent south. Yet the less prominent also benefited. Men of modest means worked as packers, drovers, and freighters. Some sold hides and woolen products, and women sheared wool and made blankets for the trading caravans. In the decade after 1835 sustained demand in central Mexico enabled almost five hundred Hispanos to ship goods south.35 That figure should not suggest that New Mexico was becoming an egalitarian society. Far from closing the gap between rich and poor, commercial developments of the Mexican period actually widened it. The majority of shipments remained quite small. Almost one quarter of all southbound traders, for example, carried less than 130 pesos worth of goods. Meanwhile, the leading Hispano families were expanding their operations into the lucrative field of mercantile capitalism. Now traveling east as well as south, to St. Louis, New York, and Philadelphia, Hispano merchants bought wholesale and sent their merchandise back to the Southwest. In 1844, for example, as his assistant herded six thousand sheep to Durango and Zacatecas, Mariano Chávez delivered some 26,000 pesos worth of foreign (American or British) goods to Chihauhau. The previous year his brother José distributed over 150,000 yards of linen and calico. The Cháves brothers succeeded largely because they, like the Armijos, Pereas, and Oteros, reinvested their profits in a diversified business portfolio. Along with operating mercantile houses in several New Mexico towns, they also acted as the territory’s chief ranchers, miners, and bankers.36 As los capitalistas spread their wings, los paisanos struggled. Even as new jobs opened up, wages remained low, and the typical worker on a trading caravan in the 1840s earned only two pesos per month.37 Unable to protect themselves from Apache and Navajo raids, farmers and ranchers seeking to sell their own small surpluses frequently lost a year’s produce. The hardships prompted many small producers to assume the role of partidero, a herder who worked for a large sheep ranch. Very much like a southern sharecropper, a partidero was loaned a flock for a fixed term. As an interest payment, he gave back 10 to 20 percent of the herd each year; the entire lot was due at the end of the contract period. In return he gained access to the owner’s vast pastures, as well as New Mexico’s virtually unending expanse of grazing land, which was considered public domain. He also received protection from Indian attacks and periodic loans of food and clothing. Like a sharecropper, the parti-

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dero’s ultimate aim was to husband a surplus large enough to begin a business of his own. He rarely succeeded. Most partideros lost sheep to drought, animal attacks, and the return of intensive Indian raiding in the 1840s. By the end of the contract period, most had fallen deeply into debt.38 The bond of the partidero and his rico overseer was only one aspect of a broader constellation of so-called patrón-peon relationships. Social stratification on the upper Rio Grande fostered an arrangement in which a patrón, or master, profited from paternalistic methods of producing wealth. The precise form of the generic relationship varied from place to place in New Mexico, and it changed considerably over time. One patrón might be a wealthy sheep rancher, another might be a village merchant. And while the Rio Abajo patrón often ruled an army of herders, his counterpart in the Rio Arriba ordinarily had far less sway. In later decades Spanish-speaking leaders served as patrones in mercantile capitalism, in party politics, and even, in the twentieth century, in distributing federal benefits. Patrón-peon relationships likewise varied with respect to the treatment of los paisanos, ranging between poles of benevolent reciprocity and rank exploitation.39 In the 1840s the scales were tipped decisively against the indebted partidero. Under Spanish and then Mexican law, a debtor could be forced to work until his obligation was retired, and although the law barred the inheritance of debt, the sheep owner typically set his own rules. In 1941 an elderly group of informants recalled the story of José María, a herder indebted to José Leandro Perea, a prominent trader remembered for owning more than 250,000 sheep. Like many partideros, José María was subjected to lashings, kickings, and beatings. Unable to support his family, he fled the Perea estate, only to be hunted down and hanged. His son, Mateo, was then ordered to take his place in debt bondage. When Mateo fell ill, his son, Juan, assumed the obligation. Young and inexperienced, Juan froze to death. Don Leandro, meanwhile, continued to prosper. By 1870 his assets, totaling more than $400,000, put him among the richest men in New Mexico.40 The fortunes of José Leandro Perea and José María illustrate the different paths taken by los ricos and los paisanos during the Mexican period. As the spirit of New Mexico’s Spanish colonial aristocracy dimmed, its descendants, now concerned more with wealth than noble titles, were joined by several upwardly mobile families.41 Like parvenu entrepreneurs throughout the United States and Europe, the rise of New Mexico’s comerciantes, or merchant class, benefited from a new climate

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of liberal capitalism. Initially, Mexican liberalism took the form of a republic, one that abolished legal distinctions of race and wealth while extending citizenship even to sedentary Christianized Indians. Yet republican commitments proved fragile. In 1836 the government signified its deference to property by imposing an annual income qualification of 100 pesos for full citizenship (raised to 200 pesos in 1843). Even when New Mexico’s ricos resented Mexico City for demanding ever more tax revenue, their complaints were far less explosive than those of los paisanos. In summer 1837, inflamed by a proposed land tax and the ordeal of Indian attacks, mestizo farmers rebelled against New Mexico’s governor, Albino Pérez, an elite soldier from central Mexico. After killing Pérez, along with ricos Miguel Sena and Santiago Abreú, the rebels installed as their leader José Angel Gonzales, the child of a Pueblo mother and genízaro father. The uprising, flaring intermittently across the Rio Arriba through fall and winter, was not put down until the Rio Abajo ricos Manuel Armijo and Mariano Chávez arrived in Santa Fe with government troops, smashed the resistance, and executed Gonzales.42 The ricos’ initiative testified to their newfound leverage in public affairs. As Franciscan missionaries and secular clergy disappeared from New Mexico, the Catholic Church lost its former influence. At the same time, a chronic absence of wages left New Mexico’s professional soldiery weak and demoralized. Stepping into the void of leadership were some twenty families, roughly 2 percent of New Mexico’s population. Most resided on the fertile bottomlands of the Rio Abajo, although in some cases their landholdings extended into the distance on both sides of the Rio Grande. Near the town of Socorro, the Baca and Vigil families operated profitable mercantile establishments. North of them lay the legendary estates of the Lunas, Oteros, and Chávezes. Still farther north, just past Albuquerque, stood the famous Armijo, Yrizarri, and Perea haciendas. Toward the eastern plains, southeast of present Las Vegas, the Ortizes, Pinos, and Sándovals ran thousands of sheep. And much of northern New Mexico was controlled by the Martínezes, whose sons had established ranching and mercantile businesses in the Rio Arriba’s smaller villages.43 With levels of wealth previously unknown in New Mexico, the families led a life of frontier luxury. They filled their homes with ornaments of the Santa Fe trade and acquired articles available only in Philadelphia and New York. In place of dark adobe dwellings, they built spacious wooden houses with modern windows. Where cushions and bedrolls once served as furniture, the gentry displayed mahogany chairs and tables, wall clocks, and pianos. New books

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lined the walls of carpeted parlors and candelabras hung from diningroom ceilings. Even styles of clothing changed, as drab eighteenthcentury garments were discarded in favor of the latest European fashions.44 As los ricos accumulated wealth, los paisanos soldiered on in fields and pastures, literally at the front lines of defense against Navajo and Apache raiders. Scraping a living from the soil, their lives hung in precarious balance. Not all paisanos, it should be said, suffered the cruel fate of the partidero José María and his family. Particularly in the Rio Arriba, distant from the largest rico ranches, farmers and herders lived in villages of a more egalitarian character. Survival depended on a regimen of cooperative labor. As men harvested grain and managed the flow of water through irrigation ditches, women plastered adobe walls, carded wool, and made syrup from cornstalks. The social value of such tasks was as important as their economic function. By uniting the villagers behind a common cause, they promoted cooperation generally. For example, the seemingly banal job of clearing and repairing sluice gates in the ditches each spring required a village-wide organization responsible for allocating water and adjudicating disputes. Yet the communal nature of everyday life in the Rio Arriba should not overshadow its travails. The threat of Indian raids and the scarcity of tillable soil wore down the villagers and demanded continual movement. To survive, individual families or even their younger members were forced repeatedly to strike out on their own.45 Thus fragmented by wealth, social status, and regional circumstance, Spanish-speaking New Mexicans hardly formed a single society. They did exist, however, in a relatively unified political context. No matter how much all Hispanos chafed under Mexico’s injustices and inefficiencies, the new nation changed the terms of political allegiance. It encouraged new expressions of public action and demanded a new vocabulary for justifying them. One immediate illustration is the celebration that followed news of Mexican independence. The appointed day of observance, January 6, 1822, opened with the sounds of street music, ringing bells, and cannon shots. A large crowd of city officials, military officers, and ordinary citizens formed two parade lines and marched through town. Between them, in solemn procession, stood Santa Fe’s children, dressed in white with blue sashes, green laurels, and the insignia of independence. The ceremonies did not end until 4:30 the next morning.46 A very different but equally telling example involves the rebellion of 1837. In spite of their hostilities, both rebels and loyalists de-

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fended their actions with reference to the Mexican nation. At an early stage in the conflict, Manuel Armijo, the loyalist leader, claimed to be bound by the ordinary “duty of a citizen interested above all in the happiness of his country.” He bragged of having “taken up arms in defense of law and order without spilling a drop of Mexican blood.” After Armijo beheaded four rebel captives, an opponent, Antonio Vigil of Santa Cruz, claimed the governor’s actions were taken solely to fulfill his taste for violence and wealth. He called on “all who would defend the sacred flag” to continue the resistance. Nationalist language of this sort, of course, is always shaped by political necessity; it is not the most reliable indicator of personal motivation or identity. What it suggests is that for both parties in the conflict, the Mexican nation functioned as a common point of reference. As Spain receded into the past, Mexico created an idea of nationhood by which the Hispano citizen, whether rico or paisano, could define insiders and outsiders, allies and enemies. With the arrival of the Americans, that duality took on still sharper meaning.47 In 1841, as he was building his fortune in ranching and trading, Mariano Chávez spoke the most famous words in New Mexico history. “The heretics are going to overrun all this country,” he told his son, José Francisco. “Go and learn their language and be prepared to defend your people.” For Spanish-speaking New Mexicans, the words proved sadly prophetic. The “heretics,” of course, were not a single group of invaders, nor were they perceived as such. Mariano Chávez, a direct descendant of seventeenth-century colonists, knew them as a diverse group of Jewish merchants, Missouri traders, and Texas land-grabbers. What the newcomers shared was the simple goal of making wealth in New Mexico, a goal they pursued by displacing Hispano competitors. In the long run, they were successful. If they did not actually overrun the territory, they gradually increased their numbers and tightened their hold over its political economy. By the end of the nineteenth century, though still representing a minority of New Mexico’s population, the newcomers had captured the territory’s commanding heights: its banks, its mining and cattle industries, its newspapers and business clubs, and its major political offices. To size up the invasion’s success, however, one must also consider its limits. Compared to the conquest of California, Anglos in New Mexico made only gradual progress in reducing Hispano political authority. Everywhere they turned in 1900 they faced a powerful Hispano elite, now led by men such as Mariano’s son, the New

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York-educated legislator J. Francisco Chaves (note the son’s preferred spelling), and backed by thousands of paisano farmers and sheepherders. The stand-off forced Hispanos and Anglos to recognize that struggles over politics, wealth and even culture could only be resolved through a broad accommodation of interests.48 The Anglo conquest of New Mexico is often traced to 1846, the year the American army invaded New Mexico. After its formal annexation in 1848, New Mexico was designated a U.S. territory in 1850 and incorporated into a new political sphere of influence. The political changes of those years can be misleading, however, for they both exaggerate and understate the territory’s social transformation. On the one hand, for much of the nineteenth century, Anglos made up only a small portion of New Mexico society. During the twenty-five years of Mexican administration, New Mexico’s total population (including foreigners and Pueblo Indians) had increased at a steady though modest rate, from some 40,000 in 1821 to roughly 65,000 in 1846. By 1850 Santa Fe, with a population of roughly 5,000, remained the largest settlement, while Albuquerque, Taos and Socorro each had only a few thousand residents. Yet the total Anglo population was smaller still. Until 1880 the roughly 2,000 Anglos who resided in the territory in 1850 increased their numbers by little more than 250 migrants per year.49 On the other hand, when American troops arrived in Santa Fe in 1846, the Anglo commercial intrusion of New Mexico had been under way for more than two decades. Taking advantage of Mexican independence, Anglo traders and fur trappers had moved quickly to exploit the territory’s resources. In 1832 the Mexican lawyer Antonio Barreiro chided his countrymen for allowing the outsiders free rein. “How long shall we continue to be foreigners on our own soil?” he asked. “When shall we see the true sources of wealth we have?” Barreiro was actually being hard on his countrymen, for Hispanos were not standing still. If they did not always seek the same opportunities seized by the Americans, they competed assiduously for wealth. Inevitably, the contest sparked a series of conflicts within a broader pattern of negotiation.50 Conflicts arose initially from the threat of Anglo commerce and, more menacingly, territorial expansion. By the late 1820s Mexican officials were eyeing with suspicion the few Americans who had settled in Santa Fe and Taos. Noting how quickly Texas had been invaded, they wisely opted not to grant large tracts of land to Americans bent on settling in New Mexico. By limiting the outsiders to the small parcels they purchased from private citizens, Mexico aimed to profit from the Santa Fe trade while minimizing the actual American presence. In the 1830s

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New Mexico’s governor, Manuel Armijo, went a step further. To promote the interests of Hispano merchants, now traveling east to buy wholesale goods, he imposed duties on American traders.51 That action was soon eclipsed by a still larger dispute. On the plains southeast of Santa Fe, the New Mexican militia intercepted a party of some three hundred Texans, the vanguard, at least in Hispano eyes, of a military invasion. Ragged and half-starved, the intruders were easily taken into custody. Yet they set the stage for violent encounters in the years ahead, each of which raised the level of Hispano hatred for the tejanos. Long after the American takeover of 1846, the little-known conflict with the Texans reverberated through Hispano culture. In 1861, for example, New Mexico territorial governor Henry Connelly invoked the image of the evil tejano invader, now in Confederate uniform, to rally Hispanos to the Union flag. The Civil War was subsequently remembered as “the War with the Texans.” 52 The more immediate effect of the Texas incursion was a heightened suspicion of all Anglo traders. As Armijo himself realized, however, the security of New Mexico depended on working with the outsiders. To insulate the territory from Indian attacks and inoculate it against invasions by Texas or the United States, Armijo granted large tracts of land to foreign-born entrepreneurs. Mindful of Anglo designs, he selected the grantees with care. Most were naturalized Mexican citizens with Mexican wives, and most had resided in the territory for over a decade. In short order Armijo gave away over 15 million acres, more than half of all the land granted under both Spanish and Mexican governments. The distribution program was not simply an act of public service. In most cases land was awarded to men who agreed to share future revenues with the governor. Nor was Armijo above receiving a direct subsidy from sympathetic foreigners. After he crushed the 1837 Rio Arriba rebellion, for instance, Anglo traders gave him 410 pesos for the “reestablishment of order in New Mexico.” 53 But cooperation went both ways. As relative newcomers, Americans and other foreign-born men recognized the need to adapt to New Mexican life. Along with marrying Mexican women and changing their citizenship, they learned to speak Spanish and converted to Catholicism. For example, Christopher “Kit” Carson, the famous trapper, married María Josefa Jaramillo, and Governor Connelly married Dolores Perea, sister of sheep rancher José Leandro Perea. If they did not actually become Mexicans, the Anglo adventurers at least recognized the need to live in Mexican society.54 The 1848 annexation of New Mexico led to a still greater degree of cross-cultural reliance. The informal relationships of earlier years, forged

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chiefly between individual American traders and Spanish-speaking elites, developed into an accommodative arrangement among multiple classes of Anglos and Hispanos. Following the Taos Revolt of 1847, in which newly appointed governor Charles Bent was assassinated, Hispano resentment of the American intruders was balanced by recognition of the advantages they brought. American soldiers, by turning their guns on bands of Navajos and Apaches, enabled los ricos to expand their ranching operations and los paisanos to farm more securely. Simply by paying soldiers and supporting public works, the federal government infused New Mexico with an unprecedented mix of economic opportunities. After 1860 government funds paid for roads, an Indian service, and mail routes. In the critical period between 1848 and 1860, campaigns against Apache and Navajo bands cost the government some $3 million annually and provided both wealthy and poor Hispanos, who supplied soldiers with food, firewood, and ancillary labor, their major source of revenue. As Col. Edwin Vose Sumner remarked in 1852, “[T]he only resource of the country is government money. All classes depend upon it, from the professional man down to the beggar.” 55 Sumner’s observation draws attention to the role of wealth in structuring the new biracial society. As prominent Hispanos forged alliances with Anglo entrepreneurs, some traditional racial barriers fell, and the gap between ricos and paisanos widened. The key to interracial cooperation was the relatively small Anglo presence in New Mexico. If Santa Fe itself seemed overrun with arrogant soldiers, New Mexico’s great sheep ranches remained largely undisturbed. And although Hispanos had lost ultimate political say to the federal government, they still received a share of appointed offices. Most important, they dominated the bicameral legislature. Into the early 1880s Hispano membership in the territorial house ranged from 78 to 96 percent. In the territorial council, the range was 88 to 100 percent. One indication of Hispanos’ collective political power is the absence of a unified rico voice: only rarely did the agenda of an appointed Anglo governor demand their concerted action. On the eve of the Civil War they were splintered into regional alliances, Democrats and Republicans, Unionists and Secessionists, and reformers and conservatives. Thus the pro-Anglo Juan Cristobal Armijo was opposed by the conservative José Leandro Perea, while Miguel A. Otero and Diego Archuleta, defenders of the secessionist South, drew the fire of Spanish-speaking Unionists. Hispano unity arose chiefly in response to Anglo reforms. Most notably, Hispano legislators blocked action on a proposed property tax and denuded a public

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education bill. In 1861 they even passed a bill (vetoed by the Anglo governor) that codified the practice of holding captured Indians as slaves.56 Sometime after midcentury, however, small cracks appeared in the foundation of Hispano power. The damage was subtle and not immediately apparent. Affluent families such as the Oteros and Chávezes continued to amass wealth and diversify their operations. Poorer villagers enjoyed military protection and continuing sales to soldiers of chile and corn. Yet as both ricos and paisanos made incremental gains, they gradually lost the wherewithal to sustain future prosperity. Their troubles arose from a confluence of forces, all rooted in the structure of the new territorial economy. One factor was Anglo capital. In Santa Fe small numbers of military and government officials, along with Anglo traders, used their resources to take control of businesses and real estate. By 1860 Anglos accounted for about one-fifth of the town’s residents but controlled three-fifths of its wealth. Equally ominous for the Hispano was a developing segmentation of labor. While Anglos worked primarily at central business addresses, more than half of Hispanos labored in the fields.57 Outside the capital city, the change was less immediate but more far reaching. Here competition arrived in the figures of the mercantile capitalist and the cattle rancher. Not long after New Mexico was annexed by the United States, eastern merchants, many of them German Jews, modified the Santa Fe trade by organizing diversified mercantile concerns. As early as 1860 the Spiegelberg, Seligman, and Staab families purchased raw materials and sold finished goods throughout the territory. By 1900 they had set up operations in eighty-seven rural villages, in many cases taking on the role of local patrón. Although their success did not spell the immediate demise of Spanish-speaking rivals, several of whom competed successfully into the 1870s, the base of the Hispano commercial class narrowed. Suffering from limited sources of credit and a lack of lucrative federal contracts, all but the most heavily capitalized and diversified Spanish-speaking businesses fell into sharp decline. Between 1860 and 1870 the total number of Hispano merchants slipped from 154 to 112, while combined assets fell from $2.3 million to $1.4 million. Over the same period, foreign-born merchants strengthened their positions, averaging a per capita gain of $40,000.58 As Jewish merchants cornered the mercantile market, Anglo cattle ranchers took control of New Mexico’s eastern plains. Moving westward from the Texas prairie, the legendary companies of Charles Goodnight and John S. Chisum claimed huge swaths of public grazing land. For decades before

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they arrived, the plains grasslands had offered Hispanos a crucial economic refuge from the populated Rio Grande Valley. Sheep ranchers, migrating families, and the famous ciboleros, the Hispano buffalo hunters, made frequent forays into the area known as el llano. Anglo cattle ranchers halted such excursions. Moving westward, they curtailed the hunts of the ciboleros and forced Hispano migrants into reverse. By the 1870s the cattle frontier was inching ever closer to the Rio Grande, threatening even the private land grants of the great rico sheepmen.59 Thrown out of balance by merchants and cattlemen, the lives of Hispanos were forever changed by the railroad. Indeed, the 1880 arrival of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe in central New Mexico was a watershed for all New Mexicans. To a place long regarded as a primitive outpost, the railroad ushered in the trappings of eastern society. In Santa Fe gaslights appeared in 1880, followed by a waterworks two years later and electricity by 1891. The new line also brought whole towns into existence. The Spanish-speaking communities of Albuquerque and Las Vegas, organized around churches and tree-lined plazas, were soon overshadowed by Anglo-dominated commercial strips that sprouted along the tracks. Most important, the railroad lured unprecedented numbers of people and dollars. Even with the nationwide economic recession of the mid-1890s, English-speaking migrants increased New Mexico’s population from 119,000 to 195,000 during the twenty years after the trains first appeared. Fueled by the vision of unexploited resources, the newcomers invested in mines, stores, banks, land, and, most spectacularly, cattle. Whereas only 57,000 head of cattle grazed the New Mexico range in 1870, more than 1.6 million were reported in 1890. By that year a mere decade of growth had raised territorial property values from $41 million to $231 million. The railroad, in short, brought about nothing less than a social transformation.60 To Hispanos, the changes amounted to both a blessing and a curse. In the short run the railroad fostered new jobs and business opportunities. Income earned at mines and timber mills supplemented the paisanos’ meager crop yields, while ricos, taking advantage of the rails, exported record amounts of wool to eastern mills.61 Over the longer term, however, the railroad brought Anglos closer to their paramount goal: the ownership of Hispano land. In New Mexico, as the historian Howard Lamar notes, land was “the first medium of currency,” the ultimate foundation of wealth. When American soldiers entered New Mexico in 1846, Hispanos owned or occupied over two hundred grants originally conferred by Spain and Mexico, most of which lay in the Rio

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Grande watershed. Under the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, property belonging to Hispanos was to receive protections afforded all American citizens, and the United States was obligated to investigate and confirm valid land grants. That did not happen. Rather, Congress left the task of patenting a grant to individual Hispanos, who were required to pay for a survey, hire a lawyer, attend hearings, and wait for Washington to render its decision. Those without money and political connections had little chance of success.62 The process was only complicated by the grants’ peculiarities. Original boundaries, having been defined by features as vague as a grove of trees or a cluster of hills, were sometimes impossible to identify. Then, too, the custom of dividing a grant among family members gave rise to overlapping claims, which were only confused by incomplete and contradictory documentation. Most confounding was the issue of common use. In theory, most parcels had been conferred as either community or private grants. On a community grant, originally awarded to a group of settlers, a family that owned an irrigated plot retained rights to unassigned common land for grazing, hunting, and wood gathering. A private grant, although made to a single individual, was often opened to settlers who also shared use of its unallotted pastures and forests. Over time, the practical differences between private and community grants faded, and occupants of both types came to rely on large amounts of shared land. That raised a difficult legal question. Accustomed to confirming titles held by individuals and corporations, American judges and lawmakers were reluctant to patent hundreds of thousands of acres in the name of a community that, under American law, used but did not own them.63 Federal inattention and intransigence left the path open to Anglo lawyer-speculators and their rico partners. In some cases, acting within legal limits, speculators acquired interest in a grant for a nominal sum or in lieu of an attorney fee. They then moved to partition the land and purchase other shares. At other times, working in league with Hispanos, they deliberately defrauded a grant’s heirs. And very frequently, when grants were adjudicated in territorial courts, legitimate claimants neither knew about the legal proceeding nor had the resources to participate. Not all Anglo speculators, it should be said, found easy pickings. They competed fiercely with each other, and some lost huge sums when their holdings could not be patented. Moreover, at least some Anglo officials were sensitive to Hispanos’ difficult straits. Just before he served as New Mexico’s territorial governor, for example, Edmund G.

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Ross wrote an extensive defense of Hispano land rights in Albuquerque. He argued that as heirs of the original Spanish colonists, present-day occupants should immediately receive title to their farms and pastures. Yet it is also clear that Ross and others like him could not stop the relentless losses. By whatever process, legal or illegal, Hispano landholdings steadily eroded.64 Reactions to the losses varied. Residents of some communities blamed each other. In the settlement of Las Placitas, as one Works Progress Administration (WPA) field-worker discovered in the 1930s, old-timers cursed families who traded their land with an Anglo prospector and then moved to Albuquerque. They predicted gloomily (and correctly) that “others of his kind” would soon own the area. Some residents expressed contempt for ricos such as M. S. Otero, a banker who in 1893 acquired the Tejon Grant by exploiting “the strange and unaccountably mysterious ways of the gringos and their courts.” Still other respondents found fault with acquisitive Anglos. In the 1970s ninetyyear-old Luis Bustos of Rociada remembered how Anglos fenced in lands once held in common. “The gringos came here grabbing all the land and throwing out the natives, “ he said. Bustos also suggested that his friends and neighbors were ill-suited to resist the Anglo onslaught. He recalled that they had neither a sense of their land’s market value nor the ambition to turn it into profit. Ambition, he said, only arrived with the “Americans.” Likewise, Florencio Aragon of La Liendre, whose grandfather sold his interest in the Jemez Grant for $150, spoke of a difference in economic values. “In those days our people did not know money,” he recalled. “The rich and the foreigners are the only ones that had money. That is what has ruined us, the power of money.” 65 As interests in the grants were bought, sold, and lost, many of the parcels themselves remained unconfirmed, their titles in limbo. Finally, in 1891, Congress decided to meet the problem head-on. It established the Court of Private Land Claims, a body of judges responsible for rendering final rulings. In keeping with the period’s conservative judicial tenor, the court took little interest in protecting Hispanos’ traditional rights of use. Nor did it look favorably on Spanish and Mexican law. Of the more than 34 million acres submitted for adjudication, the court approved fewer than 1.9 million. With considerable acreage in the hands of speculators, the court’s ruling caused some spectacular Anglo losses. Few matched those suffered by one of New Mexico’s most controversial figures, Thomas Benton Catron. Like many Anglo entrepreneurs who arrived in New Mexico after the Civil War, Catron saw the potential

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for accumulating great wealth. Moving from Missouri in 1866 with only a wagon-load of goods, he learned Spanish, studied the law, and proceeded over the next thirty years to amass a real estate empire estimated at well over two million acres. At one point he was the largest individual landowner in the United States. The court’s decision turned much of his empire into a portfolio of worthless deeds. When he died in 1921, he owned only seven tracts, all of which were heavily encumbered.66 The outcome for most Hispanos was still more devastating. Even when private holdings were confirmed, the issue of common lands remained in confusion. In 1896 the Supreme Court ruled in United States v. Sándoval that the areas so crucial for grazing and wood gathering were in fact owned not by village communities but by the United States, and they were therefore designated public domain. Setting aside more than six million acres for national forests and homesteading, the ruling left many successful claimants with an agricultural plot barely large enough to grow a few bushels of corn.67 The story of the San Miguel del Vado Grant offers one case in point. In 1794 fifty-two petitioners received a community grant along the Pecos River southeast of Santa Fe. Within a decade or so, they and other settlers had mapped out agricultural plots and created the village of San Miguel del Vado. With its enclosed and fortified plaza, the town survived the menace of Indian raids during the difficult first half of the nineteenth century, and it became a well-known point of departure for Hispano traders, ciboleros, and migrants to New Mexico’s eastern plains. What San Miguel del Vado could not overcome was the American legal system. Under the Court of Private Land Claims, the San Miguel del Vado Grant, including private lots and common lands, was initially confirmed at some 315,000 acres. But after the Supreme Court excluded common areas, total acreage was reduced to a mere 5,024. As a result, San Miguel del Vado “ceased to exist.” 68 Paisanos of such villages were not the only ones vulnerable to the new Anglo order. So, too, were a good number of ricos, among them Manuel B. Otero and his heirs. The scion of one of the Rio Abajo’s most prominent families, Otero claimed ownership of the Estancia Grant, estimated to range over a million acres to the east of the Rio Grande. Until his death in 1881, Otero’s father had grazed his sheep on the grant, confident of his absolute title. After all, the senior Otero had purchased the land in 1874 from the heirs of Bartólome Baca, a distinguished soldier and public official who was awarded the private grant in 1819 by the Spanish Crown. Toward the end of the century, however, the land fell

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into dispute. The Boston-based Whitney family, aiming to profit from cattle ranching and speculation, claimed partial ownership and declared Manuel Otero a squatter. When Otero and his men confronted the Whitney group in 1883, the two sides fell into a violent shootout. Struck by a bullet in the neck, Otero died almost immediately; James Whitney, eleven bullets in his body, survived a bit longer. In the end, neither side prevailed. When Otero’s widow, the former Eloisa Luna, claimed ownership, the U.S. Supreme Court declared the grant invalid on the grounds that a corner of the 1819 granting document had been torn away, obscuring part of the grantor’s signature. The Estancia Grant, declared public domain, was quickly settled by Anglo homesteaders.69

Hispano Fortunes in Broader Perspective However dramatically they illustrate an Hispano decline, the fates of Manuel B. Otero and San Miguel del Vado are best considered in a broader context. Indeed, the significance of Hispano misfortunes only becomes clear when one reflects on the case of California. There, within a matter of decades, a flood of Anglo migrants and investment capital overwhelmed a wealthy Spanish-speaking society. Underscoring the comparatively modest losses of New Mexico’s Hispanos, the devastating Anglo conquest of California also ensured that twentieth-century celebrations of Spain on the West Coast, however colorful and festive, would never have the gravity or perform the social function of parallel events on the upper Rio Grande. Spanish settlement of the West Coast diverged early on from the path laid out in New Mexico. Although the California coastline was mapped by Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo and Sebastián Vizcaíno years before Oñate set foot in New Mexico, colonization commenced only in 1769, when the Portolá expedition reached San Diego Bay. Making up for lost time, the colonizers developed the coastal region at a brisk rate. Within three decades, Spain had built a network of twenty-one missions, four military presidios, and three civilian pueblos. Yet the province’s Spanish population remained relatively sparse. Whereas the Crown’s land grant strategy in New Mexico promoted a dispersed society of independent paisanos, Spanish settlement in Alta California was organized around the enormous missions. Technically held in trust for local Indians, mission fields and pastures served as the indispensable resource of a highly productive agricultural economy, just as Indians provided virtually all

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the labor. Land not claimed by the friars was distributed in sizable parcels to soldiers and government officials, who also relied on Indian manpower, and that of poor colonists, to build grand ranchos. The result by 1821 was a society of only 3,200 Spanish settlers, an elite core of missionaries and landholders surrounded by dependent clusters of artisans and vaqueros.70 As was the case in New Mexico, true peninsulares and criollos were few in number. Most Spanish-speaking settlers, known as californios, were of mixed descent, with varying measures of Spanish, Mexican, Indian, or African ancestry. And as in New Mexico, the californios defined themselves against the image of the childlike and uncouth Indian. Yet pretensions to social status, widespread in New Mexico, were limited in California by the skewed distribution of land.71 Prospects for a more liberal arrangement improved only marginally after Mexican independence. As part of the plan to secularize the missions, Mexican authorities opened mission lands to settlement. Between 1834 and 1846 roughly seven hundred recipients acquired some eight million acres, proportionately enlarging the ranks of the landed elite. Well-connected soldiers and government officials, some securing as much as 300,000 acres, transformed themselves overnight into wealthy rancheros. Yet relatively few Mexicans shared in the bounty. Most labored alongside Indians on the great estates, without hope of owning or occupying much more than a small plot. Whereas the strength of Spanish-speaking New Mexico lay in its decentralized villages of farmers and artisans, many of whom owned land and enjoyed access to commonly held resources, California’s more impressive bounty was divided among relatively few hands. With roughly two hundred families owning some 14 million acres by 1849, californio society hung on the estates.72 Its fall was not long in coming. Like New Mexico’s Hispanos, California’s Mexicans emerged from the Mexican-American War in decent shape. The rancheros held fast to their land and, though outnumbered at California’s constitutional convention in 1849, retained their right to vote and hold office. For the next few decades, names such de la Guerra, del Valle and Vallejo appeared on the roster of the state assembly.73 Yet the gentry’s political success only masked its powerlessness against the absolute flood of miners, merchants, and developers rushing into California. In 1849 alone, eighty thousand Yankees appeared; by 1852, when the native-born Mexican population barely topped ten thousand, domestic and foreign migrants numbered a quarter million. The newcomers represented only the vanguard of a massive invasion, the aim of

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which was to turn California’s natural offerings into productive capital. Needing both control over resources and the workers to exploit them, Anglos worked to acquire land and create a formal system of wage labor. First practiced in mining, then in railroad building, and eventually in agriculture and oil production, the hierarchical regimes of production uprooted traditional Mexican communities and reestablished them in labor camps and urban barrios.74 The initial blow hit California’s north-central region. Their eyes fixed on land and gold, newcomers aimed to dismantle the expansive ranchos and keep Spanish-speaking competitors out of the mines. In 1850 the Anglo-dominated state assembly imposed a tax on foreign prospectors and succeeded in driving off Spanish-speaking miners, regardless of national origin. The next year U.S. senator William Gwin of California ushered through Congress an act, decidedly contrary to the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, that forced Spanish-speaking landowners to prove their claims. Even as they took up the challenge, assembling documents for judicial review, an 1853 state law allowed squatters to preempt uncultivated land until a grant’s title was confirmed.75 Meanwhile, the legislative offensive was fortified with less formal initiatives. By 1849, in response to “the greaser’s criminal conduct,” intimidation and violence had become commonplace in the mines. Lynching, though not an infrequent occurrence, was performed easily enough under the auspices of the local courts: “To shoot these Greasers ain’t the best way,” said one vigilante. “Give ’em a fair trial, and rope ’em up with all the majesty of the law. That’s the cure.” Meanwhile, closer to the Pacific Coast, swarms of squatters devoured the estates. At Vicente Peralta’s Rancho San Antonio, they cut orchard trees, slaughtered cattle, and confined the owner to a 160-acre parcel. By 1853 every rancho in the vicinity of San Francisco Bay was besieged by Anglo settlers, few of whom, despite yeoman pretensions, made significant agrarian improvements.76 The actual impact of the violence and pillaging is somewhat hard to measure. While attacks certainly discouraged rich and poor Mexicans, social decline was caused more directly by a failure to amass capital. Out and out theft of the rancho lands was relatively rare, and the vast majority of 813 legal proceedings were decided in favor of Spanish-speaking claimants. Rancheros prevailed most notably in sixteen of eighteen cases argued before the U.S. Supreme Court. Yet the victories took their toll. The costs of litigation forced rancheros to part with huge chunks of their estates. Still more disabling was the problem of fixed wealth. To a greater extent than the New Mexico ricos, many of whom spread their

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ranching profits around, rancheros typically sank their fortunes into cattle. Anglo newcomers, by contrast, invested relentlessly in land, banking, and mercantile ventures, all of which carried a high potential for long-term growth. When prices for cattle fell after 1857, rancheros were forced to mortgage or sell their land to finance debts. When drought and floods virtually wiped out the cattle industry in the 1860s, the ranchero class fell into full retreat. In 1861, for example, Ygnacio del Valle, once owner of 48,000 acres, sold most of his holdings and took refuge in the famous 1,500-acre Rancho Camulos. In 1879 he was forced to mortgage it, too. He died without retiring his debt.77 Not all Spanish-speaking Californians experienced the Anglo invasion in the same way, of course. In southern California, where ethnic Mexicans held a majority until the 1870s, the wealthier families and the newcomers often achieved a commercial and political modus vivendi. Like New Mexico’s José Francisco Chaves, the sons of rancheros learned English, worked in Anglo law firms or business partnerships, and won election to office. After Ygnacio del Valle’s death, for example, his son Reginaldo achieved notable success as a lawyer and state politician. Reginaldo remained a civic leader until his death in 1938.78 But del Valle’s accomplishment was the lot of a fortunate individual, not of the entire ranchero class. For every emergent lawyer or politician, numerous men resigned themselves to small-scale agriculture. Though scarcely imaginable in their fathers’ heyday, their plight was still less onerous than the burdens of Spanish-speaking laborers. As ranchos broke apart in the 1860s, artisans and vaqueros were forced into the Anglo-controlled labor markets, first digging trenches and building homes and eventually, with the emergence of heavily capitalized agribusiness, picking fruit and vegetables. One scholar has determined that by 1900 more than three of four ethnic Mexicans in Ventura County were employed in the very bottom of the labor market.79 The most fundamental challenge was demographic. Unlike New Mexico’s semi-independent Hispano farmers, Spanish-speaking Californians often found themselves in urban barrios, encircled and outnumbered by Anglo migrants. Most towns in Los Angeles County in 1880, for example, averaged only about 25 percent Mexican. In Los Angeles itself, Spanish-speaking Californians accounted for only one-fifth of 11,000 residents. By 1900, after Anglo migration had boosted California’s total population to roughly 1.5 million, the state contained no more than 40,000 ethnic Mexicans, either immigrant or native born. Once marked by the sights and sounds of native customs, southern California

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was being transformed into an Anglo stronghold. The Mexican character that remained was increasingly influenced by immigrants from Sonora and points south. No later than 1910 Mexican immigrants achieved demographic parity with the state’s native-born Mexicans; a decade later the immigrants held a twofold advantage. Indeed, the inspiration of Spanish-speaking culture had long since shifted. By the turn of the century, Mexico itself was infusing the region with new traditions and folkways, few of which nourished a Spanish-speaking gentry intent on cultivating memories of the Spanish colonial era. Contained by Anglo newcomers and cut off from a reservoir of native folk traditions, the gentry was forced largely to cede California’s Spanish revival to the imagination of Anglo promoters.80 New Mexico’s Hispanos faced very different conditions. Compared to the inundation of California, Anglos trickled into the upper Rio Grande. With natural increases in population, continuing influence in party politics, and a century of settlement in communities far beyond the Rio Grande Valley, Hispano society at 1900 had reached its apex. Behind it were men like José Felipe Chaves, a Rio Abajo merchant who accumulated a fortune worth an estimated $2 million at his death in 1905. Known as El Millonario, Chaves financed construction of the first railroad to the Rio Abajo and endowed a school for girls. His neighbor, sheep rancher Solomon Luna, built one of the territory’s most powerful political machines. Staying away from New Mexico’s highest offices, Luna was the territory’s most influential politician in the first decade of the 1900s. His presence at New Mexico’s constitutional convention in 1910 was indispensable in safeguarding Hispano civil rights. Nor were Luna and Chaves alone. In 1909, drawing on Hispano votes, Spanishspeaking lawmakers held eleven of twenty-one positions in the New Mexico legislative assembly. In 1915, three years after New Mexico earned statehood, they occupied twenty-four of forty-nine seats.81 Yet even as individual Hispanos continued to exert influence, New Mexico’s Spanish-speaking society itself was gradually buckling. In 1841, when Mariano Chávez advised José Francisco to learn the ways of the Anglo heretic, he could not have imagined how far his son would go. Educated at St. Louis University and at the College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York, José Francisco subsequently served as a soldier in the Union Army, as an attorney, as a member of the territorial legislature, and as New Mexico’s territorial delegate to Congress. A constant advocate for statehood, he was later heralded as “the foremost citizen of Spanish ancestry” in the second half of the nineteenth century. Yet by

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the 1890s Chaves’s influence had already been eclipsed. Seeking a federal judgeship in 1896, he was forced to plead his case to Anglo party bosses. They named him superintendent of public instruction.82 Chaves’s rise and fall is emblematic of the course followed by Hispano society in the nineteenth century. Although conquered militarily and politically in 1846, the momentum of commercial and demographic expansion continued until the turn of the century. Votes and residual Hispano wealth forced Anglos to accommodate Hispano interests well into the 1900s. Yet as the weight of Anglo migrants and capital increased dramatically after 1880, los ricos and los paisanos lacked the economic wherewithal to resist the newcomers’ tightening stranglehold. It was precisely the dual character of the Hispano condition, the combination of success and gradual decline, that touched off New Mexico’s Spanish revival. Threatened by a new Anglo order, Hispanos looked to the past for a new image of themselves, a new way to justify their place in modern New Mexico. Without Hispanos’ political clout, as well as the arts, crafts, and lore of the Hispano village, the Spanish-speaking voice in the revival may have fallen silent, and the revival’s tenor, intoned solely by the Anglo newcomer, may well have fallen flat. The story of Anglo rise and Hispano descent requires one final point. The account thus far has highlighted dimensions of material change: the rewards and losses associated with struggles over land and commerce. To complete the story, and to begin describing the making of a modern Spanish heritage, I now turn to the problem of race. Although its belated mention may suggest otherwise, race was scarcely of secondary importance. Indeed, the perception and expression of racial difference was inextricable from the process of material gain and loss. The racialization of New Mexican society, that is, the sharp division of “Americans” and “Mexicans,” each with a set of ascribed qualities, quietly supported the aims of advancing Anglos. Hispanos did not accept that division with equanimity. Their response, a demand to be considered the equal of Anglos, set off a battle in party politics, a battle that brought the term “Spanish-American” into everyday discourse.

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chapter 2

The Race Issue and the “Spanish-American” in Party Politics, 1900 –1920 Luis, as a friend I ask you a favor, and that is, that you never let them call you Mexican, because that is a great insult, and the lowest slander that can be leveled against a Spanish American. Thomas C. de Baca to Luis Armijo, Armijo Papers, 1909

Early on February 9, 1880, an unusually excited crowd gathered on the west side of Santa Fe. Oblivious to the winter chill, the throng grew quickly, and just before noon it was joined by a procession of federal, state, and county officials, both Hispanos and Anglos, who had marched from the town’s central plaza. As two bands traded songs, the most agile spectators mounted rooftops to watch the unfolding events. Less fortunate onlookers, trapped at the back of the crowd, could at least take satisfaction in being present at a watershed in New Mexico history. At the climactic moment, with two locomotives forming a backdrop, four officials stepped forward and drove home the final spike of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad. Amid cheers, applause, and the blowing of train whistles, it was left to Leland Bradford Prince, chief justice of New Mexico Territory, to interpret the event’s profound importance. It so happened that few people were better suited than Prince for the task. Once an up-and-coming New York Republican, Prince had been exiled to New Mexico after he ran afoul of his party’s leaders. Now, far from his family’s wealth and influence, he was as eager as any New Mexican to welcome a reliable source of prosperity and 54

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prestige. The railroad, he told the gathering, would answer the territory’s prayers. Bringing an abundance of people and capital, it would “cause our hills to give up their hidden treasures of gold and silver[,] . . . make every stream resound with the busy hum of mills [and] develop every natural resource and stimulate every industrial enterprise.” 1 For ambitious Anglos, Prince’s vision could not materialize soon enough. Intent on capturing their share of western riches, the newcomers had grown dissatisfied with the territory’s slow rate of growth. If Prince’s evocation of enterprise did not fully assuage their anxiety, it at least struck an optimistic note. What came next was more surprising. Like any Anglo Republican, Prince relied on the support of Spanishspeaking voters, and in recent years he had grown wary of a widening rift between the territory’s Anglos and Hispanos. He therefore asked his audience to think of the railroad’s locomotive not merely as an engine of growth but as a catalyst of racial harmony, a vehicle for uniting all New Mexicans behind the American pursuit of wealth. “Shall we not,” he urged the gathering, “today determine forever to drop use of the terms ‘American’ and ‘Mexican’ as heretofore too much employed as words of division among those who are equally American citizens!” 2 Neither the railroad nor the economic change it promised could mute racial tensions, of course. Expressed as indifference, curiosity, suspicion, or open hostility, racial sentiments were ingrained in New Mexico society, and they were only becoming more pronounced as the Anglo population grew. After the Civil War, as the newcomers pressed their claims on land and markets, the accommodative practices worked out at midcentury were increasingly punctuated by cycles of racial attack and retaliation. After the railroad’s arrival, violence in Socorro and San Miguel Counties demonstrated that racial difference could have deadly consequences.3 Still, open confrontation was more the exception than the rule. Racial conflict in New Mexico rarely reached the viciousness one associates with the American South or even neighboring areas of the American Southwest. Compared with the race riots and organized massacres in Texas and California, hostility in New Mexico ordinarily remained at a low boil. Moreover, both Anglo and Hispano leaders ordinarily worked to defuse tension, sometimes by denying the importance of racial hostility in the first place. In 1880, when a Santa Fe newspaper hinted that a “conflict of races” was brewing in Socorro, the local Democrat Advance issued the strongest of protests. “We have simply to add,” it wrote, “that all talk about ‘race conflict’ is the merest output of diseased imaginations, wholly imaginary and groundless.” 4

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The relatively low incidence of racial violence and the tendency to change the subject were both characteristic of New Mexico’s so-called race issue. As was true across the South and Southwest, New Mexicans used the term “race issue” or “race problem” (or la cuestión de raza) as a euphemism for the inequities, tensions, and open conflicts aroused by racial division.5 The term also had a practical meaning that was peculiar to New Mexico. No one who spoke about the territory’s “race issue” could forget that Anglos and Hispanos coexisted in a precarious balance of power, a sometimes cooperative yet always suspicious arrangement that redounded to all levels of society. Locally, the relationship was that of an aggressive Anglo minority, which had the sympathy of judges and the territorial governor, with an Hispano majority, which ordinarily controlled town and county offices. At the territorial level, the two groups pressed and negotiated their interests in party politics. Spanishspeaking leaders, backed by paisano voters, shared power with an outnumbered yet growing English-speaking minority. With each group wary of the potential power of the other, both Hispanos and Anglos feared the consequences of raising the “race issue.” Dependent on Hispano votes, Anglo leaders worried that open discussion of racial inequities would polarize party organizations along racial lines, throwing the system that rewarded them into chaos. Conservative Hispano politicians, guarding their fiefs, likewise benefited from keeping the issue quiet. And even Hispano critics feared that open and unprovoked discussion of long-standing prejudices could touch off a white backlash. With racial inequities in plain sight, all New Mexicans had good reason to avoid the explosive subject. It was under these anxious circumstances that New Mexico’s Spanish colonial revival began. After the turn of the century, the people long known in English-language print and conversation as “Mexicans,” and among Hispanos as mexicanos, were increasingly taking on the public identities “Spanish-Americans” and Hispano-Americanos. 6 For most of the nineteenth century, “Mexican” was the name by which outsiders knew virtually all Spanish-speaking people. “American” settlers, that is, disparaged an unschooled “Mexican” farmer one moment and praised an “educated Mexican” the next. Although occasional reference to New Mexico’s “Spanish” or “Castilian” people surfaced in nineteenthcentury newspapers and public speeches, the term had usually identified a figure of social prominence, often the daughter or wife of an elite “Mexican” landowner. By 1920, at least in public discourse, an abrupt change had occurred. “Spanish-American” and Hispano-Americano re-

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ferred to all Spanish-speaking people, even the new state’s tens of thousands of paisanos. With the new terminology de rigueur in political debate and polite conversation, “Mexican” was reduced to a term of derision, one usually spoken behind closed doors. The shift from “Mexican” to “Spanish-American” took place only because it suited the interests of Hispano and Anglo leaders. Backed by superior numbers and considerable wealth, Hispanos had the clout to demand recognition as Hispano-Americanos. In their eyes, the term evoked both a proud Spanish colonial past and an elusive American future, a future in which they might yet realize the kind of equality granted to people of white and “civilized” heritage. Anglo politicians and journalists took a slightly different view. They saw “Spanish-American” as a means of elevating the reputation of New Mexico in the judgment of skeptical outsiders, particularly during the territory’s campaign for statehood. More important, they believed that the label could be instrumental in holding together coalitions of Spanish-speaking voters, granting them recognition as civic partners without conceding real power. In a period of heightening racial tension, “Spanish-American” and Hispano-Americano thus offered both groups the rhetorical means to express their separate interests, yet only in a social and political context increasingly controlled by Anglos.

“Mexicans” and “Americans” in Territorial New Mexico “Spanish-American” and hispanoamericano emerged in public discourse after a prolonged period in which Hispanos were publicly identified with reference to Mexico. In 1821, when all citizens were declared equal under the new nation, the distinctions español and indio lost their formal status. All New Mexicans (with the exception of nomadic Indians) became ciudadanos, or citizens. Informally, the change was neither abrupt nor absolute. The two-century hold of the español ideal on Spanish-speaking society ensured its survival, albeit in diminished capacity. Along with the English cognate “Spanish,” español remained an informal marker of social status for the remainder of the nineteenth century. One historian has argued that elite families, referred to by others as los ricos and la gente fina (people of refinement), continued to call themselves españoles. Another has found that while español was gradually replaced in clerical records after 1821, the term remained more popular than mexicano into the 1830s.7 Yet even if elite families still treasured a

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Spanish lineage and clerics were reluctant to abandon a traditional term, the Mexican nation established the dominant context of identification. In articulating national allegiance and justifying political actions, that is, citizens of New Mexico referred, directly or indirectly, to Mexico. Reference to the nation by both parties in the 1837 rebellion illustrates the acceptance, however grudging, of the new political orientation. In an era of Mexican liberalism, Spain was a fading memory. This is not to say that Hispanos embraced a Mexican national or ethnic “identity,” a sense of belonging to a Mexican national culture. In private conversation and in private thoughts, most probably situated themselves in relation to the villages and subregions of the upper Rio Grande. In public speech, however, the Mexican nation remained the broadest referent of political affiliation.8 After 1846 the Mexican reference took on new clarity and significance. The American conquest sharpened the polarity of Hispanos and Anglos that had developed in the 1820s. As it brought a hybrid population of American-born but Spanish-speaking trappers and traders back to their American roots, it imposed on all residents (save Indians and Europeans) the paired categories “Mexican” and “American.” Along with the Spanish-language equivalents mexicano and americano, the “Mexican”/“American” polarity signaled that Hispanos and Anglos would henceforth rely on terms of dual nationhood to characterize the people of a single American territory.9 Neither term, to be sure, precluded the use of alternative labels. Spanish-speaking villagers, for example, often adopted la raza, roughly translated as “the people,” to distinguish themselves from the americanos. And along with mexicano, Spanish-language newspapers commonly referred to nuevomexicanos, neomexicanos, and nativos. Hispanos called Anglos gabachos (foreigners) and gringos (a term Anglos used themselves, though with some irony), while Anglos referred to Hispanos as “natives” and, with somewhat less frequency but more venom, as “greasers.” Yet even as the terms multiplied, they fit within the basic oppositional framework of “American” and “Mexican,” a framework that reflected both groups’ displaced orientations. For Anglos, “American” and “gringo” bespoke the status of the newcomer in an alien culture. For Hispanos, “Mexican” and nuevomexicano conveyed the peculiar condition of living as a conquered alien in one’s homeland.10 The precise meaning of such labels varied by context. One should not assume that Anglo newcomers spoke of “Mexicans” only in disparaging terms. In fact, for the remainder of the nineteenth century, Anglos fre-

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quently invoked the word without obvious bias. Territorial newspapers regularly discussed events attended by “Mexicans” and “Americans” as though each group was merely a discrete part of an aggregate population.11 In that neutral sense the two labels structured what historians today call an ethnic difference, a perception that Anglos and Hispanos spoke different languages and practiced distinct customs but were not hierarchically or fundamentally divided. Yet such references hide as much as they reveal. Owing to real and perceived differences of power, assumptions of social hierarchy were never far from the surface. An apt illustration is a newspaper account of the visit of Gen. Ulysses S. Grant to Santa Fe only a few months after the railroad’s completion. Following the journalistic convention of the day, the Santa Fe Daily New Mexican recounted a series of toasts given in honor of the former president. Tributes were paid in a telling sequence: to assembled guests, to the U.S. government, to the army and navy, to the territory and its resources, to the people of New Mexico, to railroads and railroad interests, and, bringing up the rear, to the “Native People of New Mexico.” Hispanos, it seems, were not only last in line; they were also segregated from everything about New Mexico and America worth celebrating.12 Reference to the “Native People” is also suggestive. General Grant’s celebrated visit may well have prompted the newspaper to substitute that term for “Mexican,” a word that carried inescapable connotations. Since the early decades of the century, the term had acquired a rich layering of ugly meaning. As English-speaking traders, army officers, missionaries, travel writers, and tourists published accounts of their sojourns in New Mexico, they were quick to pass unfavorable judgment on the people they encountered.13 Similar perspectives were printed in eastern and midwestern newspapers. Whatever the format, descriptions of the “Mexican” tended to draw on the same categories of disparagement. Compared to Anglo advances in agricultural and transportation, Spanish-speaking people appeared primitive and uninventive. Commentators frequently expressed bemused wonderment, for example, at the use of a forked branch for a plow.14 Compared to the americano crusade to exploit natural resources, the Hispano seemed unnaturally content. Writers expressed still stronger contempt for an apparent lack of virtue. They described Hispanos as corrupt in their governance and vice-ridden in their private lives. Finally, New Mexico’s “Mexicans” were characterized as an abject people, a people of poverty, ignorance, and mixed-blood. The myriad characteristics were summed up by Robert Zug, a Colorado resident who offered his opinion the same year Col-

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orado statehood and the American centennial were celebrated: “Of the Mexicans I believe I can say nothing in their praise, except that they are very hospitable. As a race, they are low, filthy, and treacherous, and seem to have no wish to improve their condition. . . . I never expected to see such a race in America; they hardly deserve the name of human.” 15 Such rhetoric, it should be said, did not represent all points of view. Many writers took care to distinguish “educated,” “successful,” or “civilized” Mexicans from the paisanos Zug undoubtedly had in mind. Moreover, some commentators professed genuine affection and respect for Mexicans of all classes.16 Even those who did not, usually portrayed Hispanos in more reserved tones, if only because they thought it uncouth to pummel a seemingly abject people. The rhetorical treatment of all nativos nonetheless indicates that the Hispano-Anglo relationship, although at times suggestive of ethnic difference, was in fact thoroughly racialized by the middle of the nineteenth century. Hispanos, that is to say, were perceived by visitors and migrants as fundamentally distinct from and inferior to the Anglo, although not solely on account of genetic inheritance.17 Unaccustomed as they were to the modern distinction between biology and culture, the nineteenth-century observer assigned all perceived attributes—such as mixed blood, treachery, or laziness—to catchall notions of racial character or constitution. In other words, Anglo observers regarded as racial traits the myriad qualities that, in the modern day, fall into separate categories of culture and phenotype. Although some of those traits, such as the Hispano’s renowned hospitality, might soften disparaging glances, the general perception of the Hispano character, condensed into the sign of the “Mexican,” nicely buttressed the Anglo’s confidence in his or her moral and intellectual virtues. Disparagement of the Hispano went hand in hand with the hope, as the Santa Fe Republican put it in 1847, that “the Anglo-Saxon institutions and spirit, which have given so much character to the race, will begin to show themselves in this interior and remote region.” 18 The newspaper’s sense of promise is telling. It reminds us that the racial dichotomy “American”/”Mexican” was established and continuously reconstructed in a setting of political-economic change. The common expectation, even as early as 1846, of rising Anglo fortunes shaped the practical significance of every racial label. Consider, for example, the words used to describe Anglo newcomers. Hispanos referred to them as los diablos americanos, cara de pan crudo (bread dough face) and bolillos (white doughy rolls). Anglos were said to be impatient,

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stubborn, and avaricious. Many nativos undoubtedly felt that their own culture, centered on family and church, was far superior to the apparent cupidity and atomization of Anglo society. Yet owing to the foreboding sense of diminishing fortunes, the insults nativos uttered while losing land and livelihood had far less bite than “Mexican” or “greaser.” 19 Shifts in wealth and political power also explain why Anglos drew racial distinctions in the first place. The answer might seem straightforward: most Anglo observers looked, dressed, and acted differently than those they wrote about. Encountered in farming villages or railroad towns, los paisanos often had relatively dark complexions and threadbare clothing. Most lived in small, sparsely furnished adobes with few tools, small plots of land, and no household conveniences. With little schooling and no investment capital, few had any hope of upward mobility. Nor did their Catholic faith endear them to the mainly Protestant observers. Yet as an explanation of racial thinking, such attributes only go so far. Some “mixed-blood” Hispanos had lighter complexions than European-born trappers and merchants. And in strictly material terms, Hispanos after the Civil War had a richer life than many “white” sodhouse settlers of the Great Plains or laborers in eastern factories. Any writer who saw the tattered clothing and cavelike dwellings in Nebraska in the 1880s and 1890s would have to look favorably on New Mexico’s orderly villages.20 The source of racial disparagement, in short, lay less in Hispano culture than in the Anglo mind. One popular explanation of the newcomers’ attitudes involves the so-called Black Legend of Spanish depravity. Dating back to Protestant Europe, the Black Legend portrayed Spanish Catholics as cruel, lazy, fanatical, and treacherous. Sharpened by the enslavement and death of countless Indians in Spanish America, the legend was readily taken up by Anglo-Americans. After Spain’s departure in 1821, the explanation goes, American animosity was redirected against Mexico and, eventually, against New Mexico’s Hispanos.21 Evidence of an anti-Spanish bias does in fact surface in nineteenth-century accounts. Traveling through New Mexico in the late 1820s, the trapper James Ohio Pattie portrayed the region’s “Spaniards” as cruel and cowardly. Fifty years later, Lt. E. T. Ruffner wrote that “as a scion, however distant, of the Spanish race,” the Hispano could only stand in the way of progress.22 What the Black Legend does not explain are references to Spain as marks of social distinction. Just as elite Hispanos used español as a term of status, Anglo writers turned to “Castilian” or “Spanish” as a more lyrical and reverential synonym for the “civilized Mexican.” The

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most common beneficiaries of the honor were elite women. After the Santa Fe Railroad reached New Mexico, for example, one newspaper reported that a party of New Mexican dignitaries, “comprising members of the oldest and wealthiest families,” had embarked on a celebratory journey back to the railhead at Atchison, Kansas. Included in the party was a small group of “ladies” representing “the blood of the Spaniard, Frenchman and Englishman,” now, the newspaper proudly stated, “blended in the American.” “Mexicans,” evidently, were kept off the train.23 Mindful of the explanatory weaknesses of the Black Legend, historians have turned to a second explanation: the Anglo aversion to racial mixing. What really repulsed Anglo writers, according to this view, was Hispanos’ mestizo lineage, an ancestry that marked them as more degenerate than either their Spanish or Indian forebears.24 The attitude is best illustrated by the writing of W. W. H. Davis. In his well-known 1857 work, El Gringo, Davis declared that the continuing practice of intermarriage kept a “stream of dark blood” flowing through the territory and vitiated all “hope of the people improving in color.” Davis was not alone. Twenty years later the Milwaukee Sentinel, perhaps printing a dispatch from William G. Ritch, reported that “nine-tenths of the [territory’s] population is of the Spanish-Indian class[,] . . . a pariah class, reared and kept in supreme ignorance.” Of the “Spanish-Indian population,” the Sentinel continued, “it is safe to say that two thirds of them were peons up to sometime in ’67; of no more account, intellectually, than the field negro before the ‘Confederacy.’ . . . With the balance of his caste, he has less real knowledge of the country and its institutions than the negro [sic].” 25 These words hint at why extreme distaste for “mixed blood” might repel nineteenth-century writers more than antipathy to Spain. Whereas the latter merely drew attention to a flawed Spanish character, the former violated what to nineteenth-century Americans was the foundational ideal of Anglo-Saxon racial purity. If writers did not make sharp distinctions between culture and biology, neither did they treat all racial traits as equal. “Mixed blood” incited a visceral revulsion unmatched by other provocations. Yet even if impurity held powerful sway over the Anglo imagination, one should not forget that it was perceived in a particular social setting. However loathsome the idea of racial mixing, the newcomers had a stake in finding it in New Mexico. In some cases their interest was material. By fostering the image of the benighted Mexican, they found it easier to dispossess Hispanos of land. Other rewards were less tangible

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but equally gratifying. As citizens caught up in the process of imperial expansion, many Americans took comfort in assumptions of Hispano inferiority. Appearing in print, sermons, or everyday conversation, the notion of the indolent and corrupt Mexican reassured the restive AngloAmerican conscience that the crusade to overspread the continent was fully justified. To a nation of devout Protestant writers and readers, schooled in the value of democratic self-determination, pangs of conscience were no small matter. The need to justify conquest also explains why elite Hispanos and Hispanas often escaped the Mexican opprobrium. As potential wives and business partners, they were regarded less as obstacles to be overcome than as figures who would fit into the new “American” order. There was little need to mark them as abject Mexicans.26

The Emergent “Spanish-American” Disparagement of the “Mexican” was not, of course, unique to New Mexico. By the mid-nineteenth century, Spanish-speaking people throughout the Southwest were under rhetorical attack. In south and central Texas, land-hungry settlers belittled “half-breeds” and “greasers.” In California, Anglo travelers described a society of indolent californio overlords and mongrel laborers. In both regions, as ethnic Mexicans adapted to changing times, a number of elite families turned back to Spanish colonial days. By writing nostalgic accounts of the colonial period and proclaiming themselves descendants of the first settlers, prominent Mexicans set themselves apart from the common laborer. A similar impulse was at work in Mexico itself. There, too, elite Mexicans sought to distinguish themselves, racially and culturally, from the largely Indian and mestizo nation. One must be wary, however, of treating all such claims the same way. Shaped by unique demographic and social pressures, declarations of Spanish colonial ancestry meant different things in different places. That becomes clear in a comparison of New Mexico and California.27 When Anglos arrived in California in the early 1800s, they found a Spanish-speaking society sharply divided between the ranchero class and mestizo laborers. Anglo observers denigrated the laborers but paid little attention to them, for unlike New Mexico’s far more numerous and dispersed paisanos, the ranch hands presented few obstacles to the landhungry newcomers. Nor did Anglo writers offer much praise for the

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californio gentry, their main object of interest. Along with an occasional tribute to good manners, writers expressed an aversion to seemingly thriftless and languid lives. Whereas New Mexico’s politically powerful ricos demanded a measure of respect, the vulnerability of the californios often brought condescension.28 When the American military attack came in 1846, and for years thereafter, the rancheros remained distant from their laborers. Cultivated families such as the Vallejos and del Valles were not prepared to organize vaqueros, artisans, and small farmers into an effective political bloc. Not that they had much chance to begin with. The sudden Anglo onslaught of 1849, followed by the more gradual but relentless growth of Anglo commerce, left once-prominent families without a base of power. In spite of their episodic success at winning political office into the 1880s, Spanish-speaking elites found themselves increasingly cut off from the grassroots of authority. The influx of Mexican immigrants into southern California late in the century only aggravated their isolation. Fearful of slipping, in Anglo eyes, into the immigrant masses, elite Mexican families wrapped themselves in the guise of a Spanish arcadia. In an 1890 article, for example, Guadalupe Vallejo, nephew of Sonoma Valley’s Mariano Vallejo, described the world before the Anglo conquest as infused with a gracious Spanish sensibility. Similarly, in 1901 Señorita Encarnacion Piñedo recalled how her family had lived among happily employed neophytes at Mission Santa Clara, where life was interrupted only by the “merry peals of the silver-toned bells” sounding “the light of the Gospel all the way from Old Spain.” 29 In one sense the californio response was mimicked by prominent Hispanos on the upper Rio Grande. Here, too, Anglo disparagement of the “Mexican” prompted a search for Spanish roots. New Mexico, of course, had never been a Pacific arcadia; the upper Rio Grande’s difficult climate and history of Indian attacks left no room for pastoral memories. Nostalgic Hispanos dwelled instead on the exploits of the conquistadores, the men who embodied struggle and endurance. A famous illustration is the 1901 speech of Eusebio Chacón. Poet, novelist, historian, and lawyer, Chacón was asked to deliver an address at a junta de indignación, a rally to protest against, in this case, an inflammatory newspaper article. Although the offending article is no longer available, one can reasonably assume that its author, a Presbyterian missionary named Nellie Snyder, was motivated principally by her aversion to Hispano Catholicism. Just before the turn of the century, a surge in Protestant missionizing raised the volume of verbal attack on Catholic culture

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in northern New Mexico and southern Colorado. In fact, criticism had become so common that no single article was likely to arouse a mass response. But Snyder took the normal complaint a bit farther. Judging by the response of the junta, she disparaged Hispanos’ customs, the state of their homes, their cooking, and, most notably, their mixed racial inheritance. Her words drew the attention of Chacón, as well as that of the journalists Antonio Lucero, Ezéquiel C. de Baca, and Enrique H. Salazar. Snyder’s words, as Chacón put it, “degrade us in the eyes of the government and the good American populace which does not know us yet.” Ridiculing the missionary’s ignorance of Hispano society, Chacón took particular umbrage at her claim of mixed blood. The sense of said article is that we Spanish-Americans are a dirty, ignorant and degraded people, a mix of Indians and Spaniards. . . . I am a Spanish-American like the rest of you who listen to me. No blood runs through my veins other than the one Don Juan de Oñate brought, and the one later brought by the illustrious ancestors of my name.30

Read as a mere assertion of racial purity, Chacón’s statement resembles the claims made by elite families in California. Although his was not the most powerful Hispano family of the upper Rio Grande, it was certainly not obscure. Chacón was a direct descendant of Don José Chacón, Marquez de la Peñuela, the governor of New Mexico in the early eighteenth century. His grandfather Albino was a judge and member of the assembly in the Mexican period. His father, Rafaél, earned fame fighting Indian tribes while serving in the U.S. Cavalry. His uncle Urbano and cousin Felipe both excelled at what were then the complementary pursuits of writing, poetry, and newspaper publishing. Eusebio himself had attended a Jesuit college and received a law degree from Notre Dame University in 1889. After returning to the Southwest to open a legal practice, he married Sofía Barela, the daughter of Colorado state senator Casimiro Barela. Together, his family, his education, and, most important, his skill as a writer and an orator ensured Chacón the recognition befitting northern New Mexico’s Spanish-speaking elite.31 Like all prominent Hispanos of the upper Rio Grande, however, Chacón lived in a social setting far removed from events in southern California. Spanish-speaking New Mexicans, having lost the overwhelming numerical dominance they enjoyed in 1850, still outnumbered Anglos and foreigners by roughly two to one at 1900. Dispersed throughout the northern half of the territory, the vast majority lived in small farming villages distant from the Anglo strongholds along the rail-

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road. Despite diminishing access to land grants, they continued to work fields and pastures, now supplementing their meager incomes by taking seasonal jobs in Colorado and Wyoming. If many struggled to earn a decent income, they still grew their crops and practiced their Catholic customs next to the graves of their ancestors. The paisano presence had practical consequences. Because the Anglo population at 1900 accounted for only about one-third of the territory’s voters, Hispano villagers could mobilize behind Spanish-speaking town, county, and even territorial officials. The villagers did not, to be sure, control New Mexico politics. Federally appointed governors and judges were almost always Anglo, as were the men at the helms of the Republican and Democratic Parties. Moreover, paisano votes often put into office conservative leaders of self-interested political machines. Men such as Francisco Hubbell of Bernalillo and Secundino Romero of Las Vegas pursued their aims while toeing the line of an agenda invariably set by railroad, cattle, sheep, and mining firms. Progressive reform was not in the cards. Yet the same organizations provided Hispanos with the jobs and contracts that often sustained a community. They also held back the Anglo tide. By pulling voters of many adjacent villages into a tight political orbit, they kept the newcomers from seizing political office on a scale already achieved throughout California and most of Texas. Then again, Hispanos understood that time was not on their side. With the acceleration of Anglo migration after 1880, and especially after 1900, the scales of power tilted more and more against Spanishspeaking interests. As migrants from Texas and Oklahoma settled on New Mexico’s eastern plains and in the territory’s southeastern counties that made up “Little Texas,” they did not hesitate to express their contempt for “Mexicans.” Fearful that all of New Mexico could fall under the pall of racial intolerance that had engulfed points south and east, places where ethnic Mexicans were kept out of public establishments and intimidated on election day, New Mexico’s nativos fell back on their numerical advantage in New Mexico’s northern and central counties, their sole hope for sustaining a political voice (see map 3).32 Whereas elite families in California, sensing a lost cause, set themselves apart from a growing Spanish-speaking population, prominent Hispanos— the Lunas, Oteros, Chaveses, Pereas, Romeros, and Jaramillos—sought to strengthen ties among all nativos of northern New Mexico. Drawing on the rhetoric of bygone days, they built a figurative wall between the “Spanish” upper Rio Grande and the “Mexican” Southwest. Echoing the colonial opposition between español and indio, the Hispano elite

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Taos 93% 2059

Rio Arriba 95% 2967

San Juan 14% 779

McKinley 29% 1108

Sandoval 93% 1245

Valencia 90% 1577

Bernalillo 54% 4219

Santa Fe 78% 2807

San Miguel 85% 4254

Lincoln 44% 1027

Sierra 53% 617 Grant 20% 2300 Luna 5% 937

Doña Ana 71% 2189

Union 45% 2069

Mora 82% 2478

Torrance 62% 1286

Socorro 74% 2446

Colfax 37% 2381

Otero 21% 972

Quay 11% 1169

Guadalupe 73% 1475

Curry 0% 790 Roosevelt 0% 763 Chaves 1% 1707

Eddy 7% 1092

Less than 30% More than 70% Ordinal numbers represent total number of votes cast.

m ap 3. Spanish-speaking vote, by county, 1915. Source: New Mexico, Secretary of State, New Mexico Blue Book, 1915 (Santa Fe, 1915), 142.

raised the profile of los nativos by defining them against the ever-present “Mexican.” The wall could stand only because Mexican immigrants were relatively scarce on the upper Rio Grande. As much as the imagined Mexican lurked in all paisano villages, indelibly marking northern New Mexico in Anglo eyes, a Mexican-born population never appeared in Santa Fe or even Albuquerque in numbers proportional to those of San An-

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tonio, El Paso, or Los Angeles. The reason was New Mexico’s relative dearth of jobs. The same primitive agricultural and industrial conditions that contributed to the territory’s “Mexican” reputation encouraged actual Mexican immigrants to look for better opportunities in Texas or California. Indeed, paisanos themselves left the upper Rio Grande on a seasonal basis to find decent wages. Often it was only in the coal mines and beet fields of Colorado that they encountered Mexican immigrants in significant numbers. Population figures, though always inexact, illustrate New Mexico’s relative isolation. In 1910 less than 12,000 of the territory’s 327,000 residents had been born in Mexico. As late as 1920, when the Mexican-born population of the United States reached nearly 480,000, New Mexico’s total was roughly 20,000, most of whom lived south of Socorro.33 The unusual social situation gave new meaning to the words of Eusebio Chacón. His images of blood and illustrious ancestors were meant to rally the entire Spanish-speaking community of Las Vegas, not excluding mestizo farmers and sheepherders. Rather than divide his audience, his words evoked the common struggle against Indian raiders and, in the present day, against the more formidable Anglo invaders. Chacón knew very well that few, if any, of the roughly six hundred people in his Las Vegas audience were free of Indian ancestry. And just as he valued his privileged background, he recognized that the town’s Spanishspeaking population was divided by perceived gradations of race, wealth, and social status. Yet with family roots deep in northern New Mexico’s soil, most citizens shared a pride in ancestors who settled local villages and withstood the depredations of hostile tribes. In spite of their mestizo heritage, they thought of themselves as a Christian, Spanish-speaking people, wholly distinct from both the Pueblos and the more nomadic Indians, just as they separated themselves from Mexican immigrants, the people they knew as suramatos (workers from the South). If Chacón considered himself a cut above the average farmer, his words were meant to evoke a time of common cause, an era when, free of the avaricious Anglo, settlers defended their land from Indian attack and built a Christian civilization. His speech thus enabled all listeners, even poor and dark-complexioned farmers, to claim membership in a single community, el pueblo Hispano-Americano, the SpanishAmerican people.34 That term, Hispano-Americano, was the rhetorical linchpin of the 1901 rally. Just as Chacón referred collectively to the “SpanishAmericans” among him, the junta invoked the term repeatedly in

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its resolution of protest. Indeed, by the turn of the century HispanoAmericano (or hispanoamericano) had become a favored rhetorical weapon of nativo politicians and newspapers editors. It was, to be sure, a relatively new label. Although it appeared no later than 1854 in a Los Angeles newspaper, New Mexico’s Spanish-language press had long favored nativo, mexicano, nuevomexicano, and neomexicano. 35 Hispanoamericano grew more popular only after 1880, when the surge in Anglo migrants and their attacks on the territory’s “Mexicans” encouraged prominent nativos to find an alternative term. When editors of Spanishlanguage newspapers founded a regional organization in 1891, for example, they called it La Prensa Asociada Hispano-Americana. Manuel C. de Baca, editor of the Las Vegas publication El Sol de Mayo, wrote that with the advent of the new organization, “the time is right for Spanish-Americans to put to an end the repeated injuries that are so often committed against them.” What C. de Baca undoubtedly had in mind was a new phase of Anglo hostility. At the end of the century the long-standing aversion to los paisanos was aggravated by the “progressive” politics of newcomers arriving from the South and Midwest. Originating chiefly from Democratic strongholds, the migrants had little patience with an American territory populated by masses of poor, unschooled, and mestizo “Mexicans.” Intent on bringing order and light to New Mexico, the new arrivals saw los paisanos as obstacles in the path toward incorporating New Mexico into a modern American nation.36 Hispano leaders responded cautiously. While they readily denounced specific acts of slander, they did not often dwell on the general climate of racial prejudice. Nor did editors of the Spanish-language press develop anti-Anglo positions in their newspapers. Rather, in leading the charge against racial disparagement—the junta of 1901, after all, was organized by three newspapermen—the editors took care to distinguish slanderous acts and individuals from the larger population of Anglo New Mexico. Eusebio Chacón himself urged his colleagues to defend themselves vigorously against racial attacks, but he counseled against raising the “race issue” (la cuestión de raza) without provocation. He understood that claims of racial inequality would only strain an already tense relationship and jeopardize the authority Hispanos still held. An unprovoked Hispano protest might invite an Anglo backlash and convince Anglos, both locally and in Washington, that Spanish-speaking New Mexicans were insufficiently “American” to govern themselves.37 Hispanos were not alone in their reluctance to address the “race issue.” Anglo land speculators and developers also sought to suppress any

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mention of racial difference. Intent on luring investors to the territory, they complained in one instance that the “unjust and invidious distinction [between Anglos and Hispanos] has kept [out] many thousands of dollars of much needed capital and good settlers.” 38 More anxious still were Anglo leaders of the Republican Party, the territory’s dominant political organization. Having built their power on Hispano votes, party leaders were increasingly torn at the end of the century between Spanish-speaking allies and growing numbers of office-seeking Anglos. The party feared that if Hispano leaders went unrewarded, it would pay the price.39 In 1897 President McKinley responded by naming the relatively inexperienced Miguel Antonio Otero territorial governor. Otero was the perfect choice for the new administration, for he had an Anglo upbringing and an illustrious New Mexican name. Yet appointments alone could never solve the basic problem of racial polarization. With the influx of intolerant Anglos, Republicans feared that if racial inequalities were ever openly discussed, vituperative attacks might well divide the electorate along racial lines. If that came to pass, Republican leaders, both Anglo and Hispano, would surely drown in the rising Anglo tide.40 Hence the value of “Spanish-American” and Hispano-Americano. Spoken in English or Spanish, the term served more than one aim. As it evoked a celebrated descent from Spanish settlers, it presented Hispanos as a people of the future. It announced that as owners of land and descendants of the first settlers, Hispanos were civilized enough to take their place as forward-looking, patriotic Americans. For many Anglos, “Spanish-American” was also a palliative. It was a term for placating restive Hispanos and diverting attention from the territory’s racial inequalities. The varied meanings are illustrated in an odd exchange that took place in 1885 between two newspapers, Santa Fe’s El Boletín Popular and the Colorado Catholic. The conversation opened when the Catholic, for inexplicable reasons, denigrated its New Mexican neighbors. Elevating los nativos to the level of Americans was a “hopeless task,” the Catholic wrote, for “Mexicans are condemned and destined to disappear. . . . They are an indolent people, and they appear to have neither the energy of the Indian nor the intellect of the Spaniard.” As the mixed offspring of two peoples, the Colorado newspaper concluded, they are inferior to both.41 Evidently, the Catholic soon recognized the error of alienating a huge Catholic constituency, and it issued a retraction, albeit one that put the newspaper in an untenable position. By “Mexicans” and “native people,” the paper explained to its “Spanish-American friends,” it referred not to Hispanos but to New Mexico’s Pueblo Indians. It in-

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sisted that it would never be “among those who use the scornful epithet ‘Mexican’ to denote the people of Spanish blood in New Mexico.” 42 The paper’s explanation was absurd, of course, and it undoubtedly convinced no one. But El Boletín had a larger point to make. Dismissing the Catholic’s statements as nonsense, editor José Segura replied that “Mexican” was nothing to be scorned. It is rather, he wrote, a “peal of glory,” the heights of which small-minded critics will never reach.43 Like his colleagues at other Spanish-language newspapers, Segura did not consider the issue of racial inequality merely a battle over terminology. He was not beguiled by Hispano-Americano, nor did he deny his own Mexican heritage. Rather, he and other editors responded to slanderous remarks with carefully reasoned appeals to basic fairness. The editors’ words inevitably reflected a range of personal and political inclinations. Never was this more evident than in the reaction to las gorras blancas, the night-riding bandits of San Miguel County. From 1889 through 1892, more than a decade before Chacón spoke out against Anglo intrusions, citizens in and around Las Vegas had protested the enclosure of their once-common pasturelands by cutting fences, burning barns, and destroying railroad tracks. Territorial officials, confused and panicked, requested a deployment of federal troops and detectives. By 1890 the operatives were already attributing the disorder to a familiar source. “To understand this [situation],” one detective wrote Gen. Benjamin Butler, “you must realize that these are Mexicans; that the Mexicans in New Mexico, with the exception of perhaps five per cent, are the most ignorant people on the face of the earth.” Anglo authorities, the detective suggested, would soon retake control. Yet four years later, New Mexico governor W. T. Thornton informed Washington that in spite of thirty convictions and two executions, the spirit of resistance had not been quelled, and federal soldiers were urgently needed as a show of strength: “Parties indicted convicted and arrested are mostly Mexicans [and] their friends are trying to create a race issue [sic].” 44 Responses of Hispano leaders to the resistance varied by ideology, party, and political faction. Republican Eugenio Romero, head of San Miguel County’s most powerful family, did not mask his dislike of the bandits. He was particularly angry that they had destroyed six thousand of his newly cut railroad ties. By contrast, Republican Lorenzo López, a rival San Miguel jefe político (political boss) and the husband of one of Romero’s relatives, sided with El Partido del Pueblo Unido, an organization with strong ties to the bandits.45 Among newspaper editors, Democrat Felix Martínez, the urbane publisher of La Voz del Pueblo, attacked the “rich land-grabbers” and expressed sympathy for las gorras

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blancas. By contrast, the conservative editor of El Sol de Mayo, Manuel C. de Baca, decried the bandits’ apparent lawlessness and moral depravity, and he condemned Felix Martínez for lending the group support.46 Thus divided by occupation, property, and social status, Spanish-speaking leaders never saw the encroachment of Anglo capital in exactly the same way. Nor did the bandits march in lockstep behind any single leader. They cut fences because economic development deprived them of fields and pastures, a loss they understood without the aid of a newspaper editor or jefe político. In fact, sympathy for las gorras blancas did not help López or Martínez. They, too, had their fences cut.47 Yet even as responses varied, they fell within the rhetorical bounds set by the Anglo-Hispano confrontation. No Hispano could ignore the explosive potential of the “race issue.” Just as editors avoided criticism of Anglo society in general, las gorras blancas spoke out not against Anglos but against political corruption and bossism. The bandits declared their firm opposition to “race issues” and “race agitators.” 48 More important, no matter how great the editors’ commitment to a Mexican or mestizo heritage, they often defended Hispanos with at least subtle reference to their Spanish roots. A case in point is the writing of Santa Fe native Enrique Salazar. In 1894 he founded El Independiente, a nonpartisan Las Vegas weekly dedicated to the political and intellectual interests of his Hispano readers. Recognizing the rising tide of Anglo arrogance, Salazar urged his readers to reflect on their illustrious past. To sustain their own culture, he suggested, Hispanos must defend the lives of their ancestors in the face of the newcomers’ cavalier ignorance. The past that Salazar envisioned, however, was quite narrow, and for good reason. To match the Anglos’ implicit claim of authority, Hispanos needed a special historical figure: the conquistador. Salazar well understood that the Pueblo Indian, the mestizo settler, or even the Iberianborn wife of a soldier were ill suited to the job of challenging the white Anglo entrepreneur. The editor therefore celebrated a vision of European manliness, the ideal embodied by “the gallant conquistadors.” Where “mixed blood” was under attack, honoring brave men of unconquerable spirit was the best way to rouse an Hispano audience.49

The Politics of Statehood In speech and print, racial attacks and rejoinders swirling around the race issue inevitably brought to mind the political order in which Anglos and Hispanos lived. Even when racial inequities were discussed

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without direct mention of government, the problem of New Mexico’s territorial status could not be ignored. Although Hispanos had enough votes to elect Spanish-speaking county officials and most territorial legislators, ultimate power in New Mexico lay in the hands of the appointed federal officials, virtually always Anglo, who had administered New Mexico since 1850. More than any other issue, the unfulfilled promise of statehood vexed Hispano leaders and inspired commentary in the Spanish press. To the recurrent claim that New Mexico was not quite prepared to join the Union, Hispanos responded in variations of J. M. H. Alarid’s simple question: “When will it be ready? [¿Cuándo estará?]” Hispanos pressed the question both because statehood offered political advantages and because it symbolized the status of full democratic citizenship. That Congress and successive administrations had deferred action for so long deepened suspicions that Hispanos were considered too “Mexican” to qualify.50 In truth the statehood issue was not so simple. It had long been entangled in a shifting array of national and local issues: slavery, party representation in Congress, public education, tax and corporation laws, and silver. Nor did supporters and opponents of statehood divide neatly along racial lines. Many backers, for example, were Anglo Republicans. Men like Thomas Catron and Stephen Elkins, remembered today as leaders of the infamous “Santa Fe Ring,” viewed statehood as a chance to move into national office and realize a fourfold increase in their real estate values. Indeed, Anglo landowners and businessmen of all political stripes looked forward to an upswing in migration and investment. By contrast, some of the larger Hispano landowners stood in opposition. Secure for the moment in their commercial and political positions, they opposed the higher taxes sure to be imposed to meet state obligations. Others, concerned about the future of Catholic schools, refused to support public education. Still others worried that turning the reins of power over to state officials would enable Anglo “land-grabbers” and party “bosses” to exert even more control over New Mexico.51 Even with the confusion of issues and positions, however, the sixtyyear postponement of statehood cannot be explained without decided emphasis on racial difference. As less-populated and less-developed territories joined the Union, New Mexico was kept out. Members of Congress did not always say so, but they proved unwilling to accept a prospective state that was dominated numerically and culturally by nonwhites. The anti-Hispano bias was evident each time statehood was hotly debated. In 1850, 1866, 1872, 1876, 1889, 1902, and 1906, local Anglos, national newspapers, or members of Congress themselves attacked

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the territory’s “Mexican” or “greaser” character. As early as 1851, a faction of Anglo merchants and lawyers sent President Zachary Taylor a memorial opposing early statehood. “We are fully convinced,” the group asserted, “that there is no hope for the improvement of our Territory unless Americans rule it, and that the spirit of Mexican rule must be corrupt, ignorant and disgraceful in a Territory of the United States.” Twenty-five years later an unidentified Santa Fe clergyman warned readers of the New York Evening Post that the territory’s “Mexicans” hold a dominant majority. “Peons and Indians,” he wrote, “have left their joint offspring the most numerous inhabitants of the region.” The same year a St. Louis newspaper expressed amazement that a territorial legislature could be made up of thirty-five apparently ignorant and intoxicated “Mexicans” and only four “Americans”: “[T]hese are the representatives of more than 126,000 people who are asking admission within the sacred circle of the sisterhood of states—superstitious, fanatical, unscrupulous and ignorant, they are unworthy to hold the reins of government.” 52 Perhaps the most disheartening attack of all was leveled by U.S. senator Albert Beveridge just after the turn of the century. By 1902, after more than fifty fruitless years, the statehood campaign had reached a new level of determination. Following his appointment in 1897, Governor Otero had largely succeeded in stilling opposition within the territory, and New Mexico’s delegate to Washington, Bernard Rodey, had lobbied Congress tirelessly for two years. The statehood cause was also buoyed by new currents of prosperity. With the recession of the 1890s behind them, the territory’s ranches, mines, and railroads were recovering, and its Anglo population was increasing quickly. Yet the high hopes of Otero and Rodey proved no match for the formidable Beveridge. Chairman of the Senate Committee on Territories, the young Republican Progressive was renowned for a supple mind and an aggressive style.53 To prepare the committee report on the statehood enabling bill, Beveridge decided to research the problem firsthand on a fact-finding tour of the Southwest. In truth he had opposed the bill from the start; his excursion was designed only to gather damning evidence. Moving quickly through the territory, he gladly paused to take testimony from statehood opponents. In Doña Ana County, at the southern end of the Rio Grande, he happened on Martínez Amador, a native of Mexico, who told Beveridge just what he wanted to hear. “My people,” said Amador, “all belong to the Mexican race. They come from Old Mexico and I think our people is not able now to support statehood, because

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most of the people here is ignorant.” Beveridge had what he needed. In his final report, structured along the old axis “Mexican”/“American,” the senator let it be known that statehood would come only after public education and Anglo immigration accomplished their “modifying work with the ‘Mexican’ element,” allowing “this mass of people, unlike us in race, language and social customs . . . to form a credible portion of American citizenship.” The words only echoed the common Anglo hope that the “Mexican element” would some day vanish in a sea of white migrants.54 The motives behind such rhetoric, of course, were always more complicated than words alone suggest. While certainly indicative of racial prejudice, the inflammatory language also served less visible ends. In the 1876 debate, when statehood was likely to bring two Republican senators to Congress, the Democratic-leaning Cincinnati Commercial blasted the territory’s “Mexican” population as alien “in blood and language.” In 1889, after gains by territorial Democrats, the Republicanminded Chicago Tribune attacked New Mexicans as “not American, but ‘Greaser.’” 55 The converse of these cases is also instructive. In efforts to neutralize the “Mexican” slur, territorial officials sang the praises of New Mexico’s “Spanish” people. In 1882 L. B. Prince took issue with a scathing letter printed in the New York Times titled “Greasers as Citizens.” Outraged by its assertion of racial mixing, Prince wrote that although “some of the Pueblo villages are quite near Spanish towns, no marriage or similar connections take place between the races.” To the newspaper’s claim that Spanish-speaking women put a price on their virtue, Prince asserted that “[n]o more high-bred, noble, and pure-minded women are to be seen on earth than among the Spaniards of New Mexico.” Six years later, another junta de indignación convened at Las Vegas, this one to protest a defamatory minority report of the House Committee on the Territories. As the basis for their conclusions, House investigators had relied largely on the infamous writing of W. W. H. Davis, author of the 1854 work, El Gringo. Among other points, the junta noted that the much-maligned Catholic Church in New Mexico was “gathering its flock in the desert before a colony existed in Virginia or the pilgrims had set foot in Massachusetts.” 56 In 1902 –3 the target was the Beveridge report. Attacking the use of “American” and “Mexican,” the Santa Fe New Mexican compared “descendants of the original Caucasian settlers” to the “later comers” who trace their ancestry back to “the squalor of some European hamlet or Asiatic village.” Con-

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gressional delegate Rodey weighed in by praising the fortitude of Spanish colonists and lauding the territory’s modern-day “American citizens of Spanish descent.” Finally, in 1906 New Mexico attorney general George W. Pritchard invoked the specter of Jewish and Italian immigrants to make his point. Pritchard compared New Mexico with eastern states that were afflicted by “the invasion of a foreign force” from Europe. Unlike the “horde of foreigners” streaming through Ellis Island, Pritchard argued, most people residing in the territory were born there. “Nor,” he went on, “is our population a mixed one. The people who live here are either Anglo-Americans or Spanish-Americans.” 57 As was true of attacks on the territory’s “Mexicans,” rhetoric in praise of Hispanos often disguised hidden motives. Statehood advocates such as Otero, Rodey, and Prince may have sympathized with los paisanos, but they did so from the distant heights of party leadership. Even Otero spoke of farmers and herders as a passive and thoroughly manageable population, a patient, undereducated, but contented people of “simple habits” who are “satisfied with [their] wages and lot.” Nor did Spanish colonial imagery alone deliver New Mexico into the Union. The more important factor was undoubtedly the surging Anglo population. Congressional resistance melted away only when Anglo numbers had reached respectable levels and trends favored a continuing increase. Yet if Spanish colonial rhetoric played an uncertain role in Washington, its impact on the territory was enormous. The effort to win over the opponents of statehood, both at home and across the nation, cemented public reference to Hispanos as “Spanish-Americans” and people of “Spanish descent.” Of equal importance was the broadened meaning of these terms. The statehood struggle demanded that all Hispanos, not just leaders like Otero or Solomon Luna, take on the civilized attributes of the Spanish past. In the fierce debates over New Mexico’s worthiness, territorial officials and newspaper editors turned even the most obscure sheepherder into a Spanish-American, at least in public conversation. As one official, W. A. Fleming Jones, reminded his audience on the occasion of President William Howard Taft’s 1909 visit, New Mexico has “practically none of the peon class and a very large number of [its] native citizens own their own farms and ranches that have been in the same family for generations.” Such citizens, said Jones, partake in a history “of which all New Mexicans—both of Spanish and Saxon blood—are justly proud. . . . [B]efore a Saxon had set foot in New England, Juan de Oñate had firmly established European civilization at Santa Fe.” 58 Perhaps the best illustration of the new meaning arose during the

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Spanish-American War. Historians today may justifiably ask why local Anglos would praise the territory’s Spanish character amid the jingoism of the late 1890s, particularly when critics outside New Mexico claimed that bonds between Spain and Hispanos remained strong. The New York Times maintained, for example, that “the Spanish-speaking part of the population has given all its sympathy to Spain” and has expressed “a deep hostility to American ideas and policies.” Laying the blame for “semi-traitorous citizens” on the widespread use of the Spanish language, the newspaper endorsed a proposal to disenfranchise every “Mexican” unable to speak, read, and write in English. The 1898 war also gave intolerant Anglos in the territory new cause to disparage their neighbors. One man from southern New Mexico feverishly informed Governor Otero that at least three quarters of the native population were Spanish sympathizers.59 What made Hispanos especially vulnerable was a shortfall of Spanish-speaking soldiers. When the conflict began, Otero expressed guarded optimism that nativos would readily join the colors. “There is no doubt . . . ,” he wrote, “but what Spanish blood courses through the veins of many an American citizen to-day, but I do not believe that fact should justify an American citizen in upholding the actions of Spain.” Yet enlistment figures by war’s end proved exceedingly embarrassing. Only 12 out of 340 New Mexican Rough Riders had Spanish surnames; of 412 enlisted men, Hispanos accounted for only 6 percent. Otero recognized that if Congress or the president determined that Hispanos had been disloyal, the statehood cause would not soon recover.60 The territorial press responded by stressing Hispanos’ dual character. At La Voz del Pueblo, editors Ezéquiel C. de Baca and Antonio Lucero argued that while Hispanos had no reason to deny their “Spanish blood,” they were “true Americans” and would readily lay down their lives. It was fortunate for New Mexico’s reputation that one man did just that. Among the twelve Hispano Rough Riders was Maximiliano Luna, the scion of the Rio Abajo’s most illustrious family. In the seventeenth century, Luna’s ancestor Don Domingo de Luna received the Rio Abajo’s sprawling San Clemente Grant for “eminent services to the Crown.” Leaving Valencia, Spain, before the Pueblo Revolt of 1680, the Lunas later established their base of power in Valencia County, New Mexico. At the end of the nineteenth century, Maximiliano Luna’s father, Tranquilino, and his uncle, Solomon, were among the more powerful leaders of New Mexico’s Republican Party. Maximiliano, returning from college just in time to volunteer for service, became the model Spanish-American even before fighting began. As U.S. troops mobi-

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lized at Tampa, he reportedly demanded assignment at the front ranks of battle so that he, a “man of pure Spanish blood,” might demonstrate his loyalty to the Union. As luck would have it, he fought at Santiago and was commended for valor.61 But the real drama was still to come. Returning to New Mexico, by now the most popular political figure in the territory, Luna was named speaker of the territorial assembly, and he quickly positioned himself to lead a new generation of Hispano Republicans on the path cut by their fathers. Then tragedy struck. Sent to the Philippines to complete his military service, Luna drowned while crossing a river. His death, though mourned in the territory, did far more for the Hispano cause than any speech or newspaper tribute. It brought the story of bravery and honor to a climax, suggesting that New Mexico’s “Spanish-Americans,” the descendants of intrepid Spanish settlers, were also “American to the core.” The St. Louis Globe-Democrat maintained that Luna’s “gallant service” demonstrated that a population of Spanish ancestry was no less American than citizens of other European extraction. There is a good chance, it declared, that Luna had strengthened the statehood cause, showing that a “robust Americanism pervades the men of Spanish blood.” The Denver News added that for too long “men have sneered at the Spanish-American population as ignorant and unprogressive, and even cast doubts on their loyalty. But Lieutenant Luna’s record and death now forces the admission [that they have done an] injustice to a brave and patriotic people.” Luna’s death thus proclaimed that all Hispanos carried within them the spirit of the first Spanish soldiers, and with it the qualities necessary to join the American nation.62

The Struggle for State Control Ten years after Luna’s martyrdom, the long statehood campaign finally paid off. In 1909 President Taft offered his support, and the next year Congress agreed to pass enabling legislation. Yet even as the anticipated moment of triumph approached, the “race issue” took on new importance. If statehood was likely to end Washington’s formal scrutiny of New Mexico and to lift the national barrage against the territory’s “Mexicans,” it also promised to throw open the question of who would control an area now being populated by record numbers of Texan and midwestern migrants. Newspapers around the territory wondered whether the Spanish language could survive the onslaught. Questions

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even surfaced about the future of Hispanos’ civil rights. One newspaper took note of attempts in Arizona to disqualify voters who could not speak English, and it implored New Mexicans to be on their guard. “[T]he day is brought nearer,” added the Republican-owned Santa Fe New Mexican, “when the attempt will be made to shove aside the Spanish-American by those looking with envious eyes upon his heritage.” 63 As tensions rose, an open racial confrontation was held in check by the same forces that had always discouraged racial alliances: the crosscutting loyalties of political parties. Since 1850 expressions of racial hostility had been both encouraged and inhibited by the Democratic and Republican Parties, or by factions within them. To gain an electoral edge, that is, activists in both parties stirred up racial animosities among select constituencies, typically in a particular town or county. But because race baiting inevitably alienated a sizable block of potential supporters, party leaders and allied newspapers strenuously denied that their followers had raised the “race issue.” “There is no such thing as the race issue in New Mexico,” said Governor Otero after the Republican victory in the 1900 elections, “and it has been now proven beyond a shadow of a doubt.” 64 It was no accident that such denials were voiced most often by Republicans. The GOP had long thrived on Anglo capital and Hispano votes, and it wanted nothing to upset the winning combination. After the Civil War the party exploited the patronage of Republican administrations in Washington and a high wool tariff (which served the interests of rico sheep ranchers) to build a solid base of Spanish-speaking support. At New Mexico’s constitutional convention in 1910, Republicans claimed 71 of the 100 delegates. The party was not, to be sure, free of internal divisions. With the approach of statehood, Hispano Republicans sensed the time was right to press their demographic advantage. Meanwhile, the party’s conservative alliance of rico sheep ranchers and Anglo lawyers was confronted with the stirrings of reform. With almost unparalleled audacity, the so-called Old Guard had long reaped financial and political rewards by doing the bidding of railroad, mining, coal, and livestock corporations. By 1910 the Old Guard’s extravagant abuses had brought into being a progressive opposition.65 The Old Guard alliance was not beyond repair, however, and the constitutional convention gave conservatives the chance to quell the pressures of both race and reform. In a brilliant maneuver, conservatives pushed through a charter that was both soft on corporate regulation and protective of Hispanos’ civil rights. The document ensured that the right to vote,

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hold office, or sit on juries could not be denied on account of religion, race, or inability to speak or read English or Spanish. It also guaranteed that “children of Spanish descent” could not be deprived of admission to public school or segregated from Anglos. In one stroke the clever bow to Spanish-speaking interests appeared to safeguard the bosses’ political base and calm Hispano agitation. The agreement encoded in constitutional language the informal alliance that the leading ricos, Solomon Luna, Eduardo Otero, Secundino Romero, and Malaquias Martínez, had forged with the Anglo stalwarts Thomas Catron, Charles Spiess, Holm Bursum, and Albert Fall.66 The Democrats, meantime, were taking a very different tack. For much of the nineteenth century they had failed to make headway against the GOP. Although they remained competitive at local levels, they were ordinarily shut out of the highest offices. Not surprisingly, it was in the party’s lean years that Hispano Democrats gained greatest prominence. Antonio Joseph, Felix Martínez, Ezéquiel C. de Baca, and Antonio Lucero were among those who rose in the party by speaking against corrupt Republican bosses. After 1900, however, as migrants from the Midwest and South crowded in, Spanish-speaking leaders were pushed out. Of the twenty-nine Democrats at the convention in 1910, none was Hispano. The new spirit of the Democratic Party was embodied instead by Harvey B. Fergusson, a delegate who led the effort to encode direct legislation (the initiative, referendum, and recall) and stricter regulation of corporations. To rally Republican support for the plan, Fergusson asked Antonio Lucero to convince fellow Hispanos that the progressive measure could act as a “shield . . . for the Spanish American people” against wholesale disenfranchisement. In fact, Fergusson, like many new Anglo Democrats, took little interest in “Mexicans” (the term he used in correspondence with other Anglos). The son of a slave owner and a committed segregationist, Fergusson regarded himself as the leader of a superior race, and he worked principally in its behalf.67 Although Fergusson and the Democrats met defeat at the 1910 convention, they sensed their day was coming. In the ten years since 1900 the flood of Anglo migrants had swelled the territory’s total population from 195,000 to over 325,000, adding disproportionately to Democratic ranks. More and more, newcomers fully accustomed to disparaging nonwhites paid little heed to the unspoken injunction against raising the “race issue.” In 1906, for example, a newspaper editorial appeared in a Democratic county titled “The Guileful and Aromatic Greaser.” It claimed that “the Mexican falls into the niche that God Almighty in-

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tended when he put on the impress of color[,] . . . [that of ] retailing the seductive tamale and his elective franchise.” Such indulgent rhetoric was always a double-edged sword. Though perhaps useful in a county election, it only served the opposing party when publicized throughout the territory. It inevitably aroused the Hispano press and energized New Mexico’s Spanish-speaking majority. Responding to a drumbeat of derisive comments after 1900, Enrique Salazar, the influential editor of El Independiente, branded the “Anglo-Texan Democrats” an “internal cancer that is threatening to destroy the vital forces of native New Mexicans.” 68 More partisan editors inevitably called on “Spanish” Democrats to change parties. To the GOP’s immense satisfaction, one political veteran did just that. The defector was fifty-one-year-old Octaviano Larrazolo, an erudite lawyer whose oratorical gifts have never been equaled in New Mexico politics. Born in Mexico to a prosperous family, he worked in El Paso until an invitation from Felix Martínez brought him to Las Vegas in 1895. There, along with Martínez, Antonio Lucero, and Ezéquiel C. de Baca, Larrazolo took up the anti-Republican cause. He and his partners were confident that los paisanos, having gained little from backing the Old Guard, would eventually shift their support to the Democrats. Yet it was Larrazolo himself who decided to switch. In unsuccessful campaigns for territorial delegate to Congress in 1900, 1906, and 1908, he had done well in the heavily Republican counties of the Rio Arriba but failed to win the support of Anglo Democrats in southeastern New Mexico. In 1910 he was further stung by the complete absence of Hispanos from the Democratic delegation to the constitutional convention, as well as Democratic opposition to the constitution itself. When he spoke in favor of the new charter in early 1911, championing the protections it afforded a “citizen of Spanish descent,” it was clear that his days as a Democrat were numbered.69 In August, three months before the first elections for state offices, Larrazolo tendered his resignation and joined the Republicans. Yet no sooner had the Old Guard welcomed their new convert than they realized he was no party regular. With growing consternation they listened to him speak openly about New Mexico’s racial divisions and the “slavery” Hispanos had long endured. Having exhorted Hispanos to seek their freedom “in the land hallowed by the blood of [their] forefathers,” he now seemed to threaten Anglo dominance of the GOP. Mindful of Anglo fears, Larrazolo did his best to prevent Anglo Republicans from casting Democratic votes. Repeatedly, he denied that he was out to fo-

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ment racial conflict. “Race war indeed? What a subterfuge! All I ask is fairness,” he said. As he recalled Spanish colonial achievements, he also extolled Anglo contributions to New Mexico: “I have not come to you to ask you to wage war, my friends who are descendants of the noble conquistadores, with the Anglo-Saxon race, for these Anglo-Saxons have come out to this land with their enthusiasm, to build up this great and glorious and illustrious empire.” 70 Larrazolo’s conciliatory words did no good. Fear that a dangerous agitator was loose contributed to surprising Democratic gains in the 1911 elections. Particularly telling was the defeat of every major Hispano candidate who opposed an Anglo. Republican regulars initially responded by ignoring Larrazolo and the question of racial inequality. They vowed to “brand as an outcast and traitor” any man who ever again raised the issue of race at a party convention. Moving quickly to calm his fractious party, GOP chairman Venceslao Jaramillo, husband of Cleofas, praised the valor of New Mexico’s “Spanish-American” forebears but called for all groups in the party to reunite under its established leadership. It may appear odd that every Hispano candidate was defeated, he said, but “the so-called race issue had nothing to do with it.” Likewise, Republican veteran L. B. Prince expressed confidence that his “Spanish-American friends” faced a bright future and “certainly [had] no reason to draw lines of division and raise ‘race issues.’” 71 As in his 1880 speech beside the new railroad tracks, Prince deliberately understated the character of New Mexico’s racial conflict. But now that the issue was in the open, Anglo leaders of both parties sought to exploit it. The matter was of particular concern to GOP stalwarts. A decade earlier the Old Guard might have simply written Larrazolo out of the party. But after 1912 the prospect of chronic attacks from Republican progressives forced the stand-patters to work doubly hard for the large “Mexican vote,” still estimated to be more than half the GOP’s total support.72 In 1914 Sen. Albert B. Fall conceded privately that the party would have to nominate “a mexican” [sic] either for Congress or an equally high post. Two years later the situation was even more dire. Old Guard stalwart Holm Bursum broke the news to Fall in Washington: “The race issue is rather alarming— especially in the North—if it prevails it will destroy the Republican Party—neither Sec [Secundino Romero] or Larrazolo are good men to have on the ticket—I am in favor of giving the Mexicans a liberal representation but give it to natives who are not filled with race prejudice.” 73 The party ultimately slated the mild-mannered B. C. Hernández as

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candidate for Congress and Bursum himself for governor, a combination that seemed sufficient to rally wayward Republicans. But the Democrats had a strategy of their own. Immediately after the 1911 elections, sensing a split in the GOP, they began to soften their own anti-Hispano image. They scorned Republicans for deserting Hispano candidates who lost in 1911, and they pointed proudly to the election of Larrazolo’s former ally, Democrat Ezéquiel C. de Baca, as New Mexico’s first lieutenant governor.74 C. de Baca, it is worth noting, was no party hack. A former reporter and editor at reform-oriented La Voz del Pueblo, he had long worked for the interests of los paisanos in San Miguel County and even sided with the night-riding gorras blancas. Above all, he was fiercely committed to bringing down the unprincipled Old Guard. Believing, as Larrazolo once did, that the Democratic Party was Hispanos’ natural home, he used the office of lieutenant governor to appoint Spanish-speaking officials. “It would be political suicide,” he explained to an Anglo applicant, “to do less than the Republicans have done in the recognition of the native sons of this soil, and it would be unjust and unfair to ignore them.” 75 Anglo Democrats were outraged. Although Harvey Fergusson and Gov. William McDonald were willing to pay rhetorical tribute to New Mexico’s Spanish past, they hoped to limit Hispano officeholders to a few token positions. They soon found a way to fit C. de Baca himself into their plans. To widespread surprise at the 1916 party convention, they nominated him for governor. The candidacy attracted tremendous Hispano support and threw the GOP off balance. After losing the state’s five most heavily Hispano and Republican counties by only six-tenths of a percent, C. de Baca prevailed in the general election. The catch was that the humble Las Vegas Democrat was gravely ill. Suffering from a malady diagnosed as pernicious anemia, he died six weeks after his inauguration in a hospital bed. Anglo Democratic leaders, having anticipated his death, had cleverly slated their real choice, the current governor, William McDonald, as candidate for lieutenant governor, thereby paving the way for his succession.76 The deceptive tactics were symptomatic of the two parties’ even strength. Running neck and neck by 1916, both tried to quiet talk of racial difference while appearing receptive to “Spanish-Americans.” The new political demands favored Republican regulars, for in spite of the death of Solomon Luna in 1912, the state’s most powerful Hispanos remained in the GOP. Moreover, Anglo Republican bosses like Holm Bursum and the elderly Thomas Catron had worked with poor His-

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panos for several decades, cultivating strong political ties. Nor could the Democrats easily discard their reputation for intolerance. In fact, they stumbled badly at the party’s 1918 convention. Once again they selected an Hispano nominee for governor, Rio Arriba County’s Felix García. Despite evidence of a checkered past, Garcia had the virtue of adding both racial and regional balance to the Democratic ticket. During the nominating speeches, however, one enthusiastic delegate, a recent migrant from Mississippi, made the unpardonable mistake of waving off his Spanish-speaking interpreter. New Mexico was officially bilingual, and the translation of all proceedings was required by law. When the interpreter persisted, the speaker broke off his address and backed the stunned man against a wall. “I don’t want to talk to anybody but Americans,” he shouted. “I can make my meaning clear to them.” 77 Garcia’s nomination and the convention blunder ensured that the GOP would select an Hispano challenger. Among the potential nominees, including Las Vegas boss Secundino Romero, rancher Eduardo Otero, and Adj. Gen. James Baca, Larrazolo was the Old Guard’s last choice. Yet he gained the nomination, in part because he was a proven vote-getter whom Republican progressives would not dismiss as an organization man. Placing Larrazolo into nomination, Old Guard lieutenant Charles Spiess (“the Black Eagle”) denounced “the race question” and claimed that Larrazolo’s sole aim was “political equality for the Spanish people.” Larrazolo followed Spiess with the assurance that he was a true American who asked no more than equal rights for all. Assisted by a Republican draft board that sent 3,500 more Democrats than Republicans out of state, Larrazolo and the whole GOP ticket prevailed.78 Yet the Old Guard’s honeymoon with Larrazolo was shortlived. Conservative Republicans soon recognized that the governor was too liberal for their taste and too ready to appoint Hispanos to state office. If voters accepted him in 1918 as an evenhanded SpanishAmerican, the Old Guard was quick to recall his Mexican origins two years later. “Let us have no more Old Mexico in New Mexico . . . ,” wrote one opponent to Bursum, “[and] do our duty as the party has always done it.” Even Hispano regulars turned against him. At the party’s 1920 convention, Secundino Romero denounced him as a “foreigner” and delivered all 129 delegates from San Miguel County to the Anglo nominee.79 It is hard to say how the diverse body of Hispano politicians and voters reacted to the volatile rhetoric of the 1910s. Contrary to the beliefs of many Anglo leaders, nativos did not vote as a bloc, nor did they react

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reflexively to florid speeches about Spanish colonial blood. Although Larrazolo’s many references to el pueblo hispanoamericano suggest a widespread pride in the upper Rio Grande’s Spanish past, nativos were not necessarily moved by a single appeal. They certainly knew how to spot an empty display of symbolism. In one notable case, four Anglo Democrats introduced a resolution at the first state legislature in 1912 to induce Hispanos into casting a “race vote.” The resolution recalled the exploits of the first Spanish colonists and praised “the direct descendants of those historic conquistadores who belong by blood and language to that venerable race.” It concluded with a call to elect a “Spanish-American” as U.S. senator. Spotting the ploy, Hispano legislators turned it against the resolution’s sponsors. Wasn’t it true, they asked P. E. Carter of Tucumcari, that the city council on which he served passed an ordinance forbidding “Mexicans” to patronize Anglo barbershops? Did Mr. J. T. Evans of Roswell know anything about a skating rink in his town that bore the sign, “Niggers and Mexicans not allowed”? 80 Nor were all Hispanos necessarily enamored of Larrazolo. His references to descendants of noble conquistadors could hardly disguise his willingness to join the Republican stalwarts. Having labeled Old Guard leader Holm Bursum in 1908 “the most unscrupulous and corrupt politician that has ever disgraced a community,” he was praising Bursum by 1911 as the party’s “clean, honest and good-hearted leader.” The about-face prompted former colleagues at reform-minded La Voz del Pueblo to question his character.81 Other Hispano Democrats, though they might sympathize with Larrazolo’s intentions, worried that his campaign on behalf of nativo equality was dominated by Republicans. Albuquerque attorney Manuel Vigil argued that the movement could only succeed if it remained nonpartisan. Too close an association with the GOP, he argued, would bring about the “ruin” of Hispano New Mexico. Even Republicans worried about what lay ahead. One of Larrazolo’s closest associates, Las Vegas attorney Luis Armijo, predicted that Larrazolo’s inspiring rhetoric of the 1910s would soon come to haunt nativos. “The day is not very far when instead of being in the majority we will be in the sad minority,” Armijo said, “and when that time has come we will have ‘to pay.’” 82 Vigil and Armijo were not far off, although the political consequences they feared were not immediately evident. In fact, Larrazolo’s so-called native son movement paid considerable short-term dividends. Even as the proportion of Hispanos steadily fell through the teens and twenties, nativos gained acceptance as permanent partners in New Mex-

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ico politics. A formal kind of recognition was the split ticket. Beginning in 1916, Anglo party leaders were forced to address Hispano demands for nominations and appointments. By 1922, as Old Guard stalwart Eduardo Otero reported to Fall, “Paisanos” in both northern and southern New Mexico were prepared to demand half the Republican ticket. In 1926 Spanish-speaking activists succeeded in holding up the Democratic convention until a ticket “more representative of the descendants of the conquistadores” (i.e., six of twelve positions) was put forth. Two years later, an aging Larrazolo insisted on a fifty-fifty distribution before he would accept the GOP nomination for U.S. senator, a nomination now demanded by insurgent progressives. Although Larrazolo was clearly not alone in pushing the issue, he is rightly credited with leading and inspiring the campaign until his death in 1930. Because of the risks he bore, according to one political observer, the balanced ticket became a “sine qua non in every state campaign.” 83 Less formally, the partnership with Hispanos was built around the obligatory tribute to “Spanish-Americans” and New Mexico’s Spanish colonial roots. After 1911 Anglos of both parties adopted the new rhetoric for public reference to all Hispanos, candidates as well as voters. “Mexican,” still voiced in private, was kept out of public conversations as much as possible. In spoken and printed Spanish, Hispanos likewise adopted Hispano-Americano, though not to the exclusion of mexicano or nativo. It is of course difficult to quantify with precision how thoroughly “Spanish-American” or Hispano-Americano spread throughout New Mexico’s larger population. The agreement to use “Spanish-American” in newspaper articles and public speeches probably did not change the habits of working-class Anglos, particularly those who resided outside the upper Rio Grande. In 1916, for example, eighty-seven residents of Trinidad, a Colorado town just across the state line, signed a letter stating their refusal to share the town’s main dance floor with “those so-called Spanish-Americans.” In no other town, the letter continued, does one see “the Mexicans on the same floor thinking themselves on the level or above the white folks.” 84 The stubborn hold of “Mexican” in the Anglo lexicon paralleled the persistence of words spoken by paisanos. Thousands of farmers and sheepherders continued to refer to themselves as la raza, mexicanos, or mexicanos de nuevo méxico. It is therefore all the more remarkable that when constituents corresponded with their leaders, they so often chose hispanoamericano. When Ezéquiel C. de Baca was elected in 1916, a number of nativos expressed their delight to the state’s first Spanish-American gov-

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ernor. Cipriano Lujan, a merchant from the town of Sabinoso, thought the new governor would show the world that the “Spanish Americans” are capable of running a state. Although Lujan had use of business stationery and a typewriter, the term was not limited to constituents in his position. Anastasio Manzanares, a resident of San Miguel County, described the “great honor of the Spanish-American people” in having a governor “of [their] own blood.” One man asked C. de Baca to consider a minimum wage of $1.50 for eight hours of labor, which would be of particular benefit to “Spanish-American” workers and day laborers. Another, from Leadville, Colorado, asked to be appointed a “Spanish-American Consul” so that he might protect his town’s mistreated miners.85 The letters suggest that “Spanish-American” was regarded as the only proper term to refer to nativos in public communication. The problem for Hispanos, and the opportunity for Anglos, was that no word inflected with Spanish colonial imagery ever bore a fixed meaning. To be sure, “Spanish-American” was implicitly juxtaposed to “Mexican”; reference to New Mexico’s Spanish people reiterated the claim that Hispanos carried a distinctive racial and cultural inheritance. The imagery suggested that rich or poor, Hispanos were a stable and civilized population, a people who could be trusted. Yet the precise social significance of all Spanish rhetoric shifted according to the context of its expression. When an Hispano such as C. de Baca or Larrazolo invoked a Spanish past on his own initiative, he was immediately accused by Anglos of inciting racial hostility, dividing the electorate for selfish interests. When an Anglo did the talking, he was likewise applauded by his colleagues for acting in the best interests of the Anglo-dominated party, that is, of exploiting racial difference in a way that minimized Hispano gains. In other words, the practical meaning of “Spanish-American” was determined by the social setting in which it was heard. Nativos certainly adopted Spanish colonial symbolism to express their dignity as descendants of brave and manly Spanish conquistadors, and to demand, as American citizens, a measure of political equality. To some degree, they succeeded. As it helped to bring statehood to New Mexico, the image of the civilized “Spanish-American” contributed to the election and appointment of Hispano officials long after 1912. Yet far from upsetting the state’s structure of power, the rhetoric ultimately legitimized it. By helping to create the appearance of substantial equality, it made the Anglo order seem all the more natural. In 1920 the wealth and political pull of Anglo cattlemen, railroads, and mines remained secure. The lives of

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los paisanos were equally unchanged. Even the formulaic distribution of offices underscored Anglo control. One satisfied Hispano leader responded to a balanced ticket in 1928 by asserting that “the interests of the Spanish-Americans of this state have been well taken care of.” In truth, the great majority of nativos continued to suffer from shrinking and overcrowded land grants, unsound use of natural resources, hunger, illiteracy, and an endemic lack of economic opportunity. Even as the Old Guard faded in the mid-1920s, New Mexico remained a very poor state. And after Larrazolo was defeated in 1920, no Hispano governor took office until 1974.86 New Mexico’s modern Spanish heritage thus arose in a conservative political climate, a climate wholly congenial to the rhetorical transformation of benighted “Mexicans” into the civilized, if still humble, bearers of a distinctive Spanish colonial inheritance. The events of party politics, however, made up only one part that transformation. Alongside rhetorical symbolism of Spanish conquistadors, enthusiasts created arresting visual images, the most prominent of which was a new form of adobe architecture. Just after the turn of the century, as “SpanishAmerican” was being established as a symbol for speech and print, a Spanish colonial architectural style emerged on the streets of Santa Fe. The capital city’s civic promoters, closely allied with the Republican Old Guard, attempted to accomplish what rhetoric alone was unable to do—to embody images of Spanish colonial grandeur in a visual form, one powerful enough to refigure a social landscape.

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figure 1. Isleta, New Mexico, 1902. The original caption reads “Mexican Idlers.” The dilapidated adobe was a favorite backdrop for portraying Spanishspeaking people as listless “Mexicans.” Photo by D. T. Duckwall, Jr. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

figure 2. Santa Fe, ca. 1885. To Anglo newcomers, the capital city’s crumbling adobes and narrow, muddy streets epitomized the character of the territory’s Spanish-speaking people. Legislators tried repeatedly to move the capital from the “Adobe Town” to a more “American” settlement. Photo by Henry Brown. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

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figure 3. Palace of the Governors, ca. 1885. The governor’s residence, headquarters of New Mexico’s territorial government, and stable of burros. Before its restoration in 1913, the building’s classical columns and balustrade reflected efforts to impose an Anglo order on the Hispano territory. Pierce Collection. This item is reproduced by permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

figure 4. Honeymoon portrait of Venceslao and Cleofas Jaramillo, 1898. The wedding joined together two of northern New Mexico’s best-known families. The couple’s prominence at 1900 and misfortunes thereafter mirrored the fate of New Mexico’s Spanish-speaking gentry. Photograph by Schumacher. Courtesy of the Museum of New Mexico. Neg. no. 67224.

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figure 5. Octaviano Larrazolo, ca. 1920. Brilliant orator and champion of Hispano civil rights, the scholarly Larrazolo was the state’s first Spanish-speaking governor. As leader of the so-called native son movement, he helped to transform “Mexican” voters into “Spanish-Americans.” Photograph by William R. Walton. Courtesy of the Museum of New Mexico. Neg. no. 47798.

figure 6. Antonio Lucero, ca. 1918. Colleague and close friend of Larrazolo before 1911, Lucero remained a staunch opponent of New Mexico’s dominant Republican Party. During the 1910s, he spoke out against “race prejudice” and called on all New Mexicans to recognize “Spanish-Americans” as members of the “Aryan race.” Courtesy of the Museum of New Mexico. Neg. no. 50412.

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figure 7. Harvey Company Indian Building, Alvarado Hotel, Albuquerque, ca. 1905. California’s Mission Revival architecture arrived in New Mexico in the form of railroad hotels. Like the Franciscan missions of old, the new buildings created an aura of southwestern civility for the tourist’s encounter with Native Americans. Herman Witteman Collection. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

figure 8. Mission San Estevan, Acoma Pueblo, ca. 1883. The dramatic structure, set high on an austere desert mesa, bespoke the endurance of a Spanish civilization through centuries of struggle. With its simple lines and embattled history, the building offered a model for distinguishing Santa Fe’s new adobe architecture from the more ornate and pastoral motifs of southern California. Photograph by Ben Wittick. Courtesy of the Museum of New Mexico. Neg. no. 15586.

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figure 9. Museum of Fine Arts, ca. 1918. The new building, modeled primarily on Mission San Estevan, linked the civilizing labors of Franciscan missionaries to present-day efforts to enlighten a seemingly benighted New Mexico. Courtesy of the Museum of New Mexico. Neg. no. 28867.

figure 10. Saint’s day in the Rio Arriba, ca. 1925. Long before the Santa Fe Fiesta was revived in 1919, Hispanos throughout New Mexico held their own village fiestas. Each paid homage to a patron saint, whom villagers often bore in solemn procession through dusty streets and fields. A. M. Bergere Collection. Courtesy of the New Mexico State Records Center and Archives. Neg. no. 23298.

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figure 11. De Vargas entrada, Santa Fe Fiesta, ca. 1930. Officially held to commemorate the reconquest of Santa Fe from Pueblo Indians in 1692-93, the Fiesta was turned into an Hispano-centered celebration only in the late 1920s. Note the restored Palace of the Governors. C. Davies Collection. Courtesy of the New Mexico State Records Center and Archives. Neg. no. 4415.

figure 12. Hysterical Parade (I), Santa Fe Fiesta, ca. 1930. In the mid1920s Santa Fe’s community of artists and writers organized the “Hysterical Parade” as a takeoff on the festival’s solemn Indian dances and historical pageantry. Anglo participants burlesqued local and national events. Elizabeth DeHuff Collection. Courtesy of the Center for Southwest Research, General Library, University of New Mexico. Neg. no. 000-009-0118.

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figure 13. Hysterical Parade (II), Santa Fe Fiesta, 1930. Hispano villagers also took part in the Hysterical Parade, but they played “themselves.” Donning farm clothes and parading in burro-drawn wagons, they presented a tableau of the exotic Spanish colonial villager. Courtesy of the Museum of New Mexico. Neg. no. 88021.

figure 14. Nina OteroWarren at the Santa Fe Fiesta, ca. 1930. Educator, politician, and author of Old Spain in Our Southwest, Otero-Warren established herself in the 1920s as the principal Hispana admirer of a Spanish colonial past. Here she is pictured in the Hysterical Parade, posing as a Velázquez painting. The artist John Sloan assisted in the presentation. A. M. Bergere Collection. Courtesy of the New Mexico State Records Center and Archives. Neg. no. 21717.

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figure 15. Indian Detours at Truchas, ca. 1928-29. In the early 1920s automobile tours put the once-secluded Hispano village on the tourist’s itinerary. As the Packards rumbled up steep mountain roads, they carried passengers back into “medieval” settings, places seemingly untouched by the twentieth century. Photograph by Edward A. Kemp. Courtesy of the Museum of New Mexico. Neg. no. 46949.

figure 16. Wood-carver with chest, 1940. The revival of socalled Spanish colonial arts in the late 1920s brought new prominence to villagers skilled in manual craftsmanship. It also answered the question, incorrectly as it turned out, of how impoverished farmers and sheepherders could find a niche in a modernizing economy. Photograph by Russell Lee. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

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figure 17. Storefront in the village of Questa, 1939. Admirers of the Rio Arriba were dismayed to find the signs of mass culture moving rapidly into some of the more out-of-the-way Hispano villages. Photograph by Russell Lee. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

figure 18. A threat still greater than advertising slogans was the mail order catalog. Enabling Hispano farmers to obtain massproduced goods, the catalog became a symbol of “machine civilization” on the upper Rio Grande. Photograph by John Collier. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

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figure 19. One of the more popular literary images of the twenties and thirties was the Hispano wood hauler and his burro. In poems, novels, and nonfictional accounts, the motif of the slow-footed man and animal presented a welcome counterpoint to the bustle of modern America. Mary Austin Collection. This item is reproduced by permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

figure 20. Promotional photo for the Coronado Cuarto Centennial, 1940. Demographic changes eventually undercut the value of Spanish colonial imagery as a marker of social distinction. By 1940 the deployment of attractive women, bright dresses, and a beckoning pose reflected the symbols’ sole remaining function: to attract tourists. Photograph by Harold D. Walter. Courtesy of the Museum of New Mexico. Neg. no. 51112.

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chapter 3

Mission Architecture and Colonial Civility, 1904 –1920 [I]t was Spain that wrested New Mexico from the darkness of idolatry and planted in its stead the radiant light of the Christian faith; it was Spain that redeemed it from a state of barbarism and implanted civilization in its place. Ezéquiel C. de Baca, C. de Baca Papers, October 6, 1913

[B]ut for language, Old Mexico is as foreign a country to most of New Mexico’s citizens as to those of Arkansas or Wisconsin. Santa Fe New Mexican, January 22, 1916

One evening in January 1919, Museum of New Mexico director Edgar Lee Hewett presented a lecture titled “Spain the Motherland” to a gathering of Santa Fe’s prominent citizens. Hewett’s appearance was in one sense quite routine. Well known for his readiness to step before a podium, the archaeologist and civic promoter spoke frequently about the culture and history of northern New Mexico. The topic this night, however, was outside his circle of interest. Since arriving in New Mexico in 1898, Hewett had demonstrated his fascination with Indian tribes and their ancestors. He had worked tirelessly and with ultimate success to establish in Santa Fe the Museum of New Mexico and the first American branch of the famous Archaeological Institute of America. But he had never shown much interest in Hispano history or culture. Now, connecting New Mexico and Spain, he called attention to colonial 89

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M I S S I O N A RC H I T E C T U R E A N D C O L O N I A L C I V I L I T Y

achievements in statesmanship, literature, and art. Of all Spain’s accomplishments, Hewett told his audience, its innovative architecture made the deepest impression. Still embodied in the upper Rio Grande’s mission churches, Spain’s architectural genius left the young state a “priceless heritage.” 1 It was only fitting that the mission design Hewett extolled was most stunningly exemplified by the very building in which he spoke, the New Mexico Museum of Fine Arts. Constructed in 1917 to resemble the state’s most prominent mission church, the adobe cathedral at Acoma Pueblo, the new museum building had already become nationally and internationally famous. Its massive walls, curving lines, and smooth finish achieved a stately effect, one very different from the tumbledown appearance of Santa Fe’s adobe houses. That contrast was no accident. So much a monument to times past, the building was constructed as part of an architectural campaign to present Santa Fe as the capital city of a twentieth-century New Mexico, a modern commonwealth that, however exotic its history and culture, had cast off its primitive ways. The basis of the new architecture was formulated in 1912, the same year New Mexico attained statehood. Hewett, his colleagues, and his Republican supporters looked to architecture to re-present New Mexico in large part because other promotional avenues were blocked. With its impecunious population and thin tax base, New Mexico could hardly devote great sums to educating its people or modernizing its towns. By contrast, architecture required a relatively small initial investment, one often borne by philanthropists and enthusiastic builders. Although no substitute for migrants and capital, an eye-catching building at least proclaimed that the state offered far more than the meager rewards represented by the crumbling adobe.2 In one sense there was nothing unusual about Santa Fe’s architectural campaign. After the Civil War, as boosters attracted settlers to towns across the West, civic leaders turned to architectural design to create an aura of order and sobriety. In keeping with the didactic spirit of Victorian America, town fathers erected private residences, libraries, and courthouses in a decorous and sometimes extravagant style, one that assured citizens that the days of crude vice and violence were in the past. At the tail end of the Victorian era, city design was taken a step further. Throughout the nation civic leaders joined in the City Beautiful movement, an effort to order and beautify entire urban cores. New buildings, streets, sidewalks, parks, and even trees and shrubs were integrated into comprehensive city plans. In Santa Fe Hewett and his col-

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leagues embraced the Victorian commitment to civic decorum, and they eagerly explored City Beautiful tenets for refashioning their cramped environs. Yet they set standard American materials and models aside. Shunning red brick, gingerbread cuts, pitched roofs, and classical columns, they embraced an architecture of mud. Their decision seems peculiar in light of their particular backgrounds and social aims. Hewett and most of his Anglo colleagues, born in midwestern and eastern states, were thoroughly unaccustomed to adobe architecture when they arrived in New Mexico. Their first impression of the mud houses could not have been especially favorable. And as a symbol of New Mexico’s future, the adobe undoubtedly struck most Anglos as an exceedingly poor choice. If the aim was to present New Mexicans as up-to-date Americans, a people who had set aside their “Mexican” ways and were ready to take their place in the United States, why model a new museum on an adobe church? 3 One answer is that civic leaders sought to distinguish Santa Fe from the more “American” towns of New Mexico and New Mexico itself from surrounding states. The town’s promoters, one might say today, sought to create a distinctive “civic identity” for Santa Fe and a larger “regional identity” for the interior Southwest. Intrigued by the romantic possibilities of the upper Rio Grande, they also hoped to build a potent tourist industry, the model for which was southern California. By the end of the nineteenth century, the greater Los Angeles area was already establishing a commercial sphere of influence over the Southwest, and its orange trees and bougainvillea vines were sinking roots into the American imagination. Although the story of L.A.’s stunning growth has many chapters, a principal one is the city’s early commitment to tourism. Even before 1900, civic boosters, writers, artists, merchants, and railroad operators were transforming sites in southern California into a wonderland for middle- and upper-class visitors, thereby turning the city into a tourist hub. The feverish activity did not escape the envious gaze of Santa Fe’s civic leaders. To capture their own share of the westward tourist traffic, the argument goes, they looked past the visual style of Victorian America, as well as the neoclassicism of the City Beautiful, and embraced the romance of bygone days. Gambling that the capital city’s storied past was its key to prosperity, they relied on adobe architecture to put Santa Fe at the center of the tourist’s map.4 Explanations that connect artistic design to a profit motive always have a satisfying ring. Yet in Santa Fe’s case neither romantic aesthetics nor tourism alone can account for the appeal of the new architecture.

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Had the quest for tourist dollars solely governed its development, the art museum might have resembled a Navajo hogan and downtown Santa Fe a faux Indian pueblo. That is because Indian peoples have always been northern New Mexico’s most popular tourist attractions. That a Catholic mission church became the preferred architectural model is partly indicative of the political clout of Hispanos. Adamant that an existing building, Santa Fe’s Palace of the Governors, be preserved as a “monument to the Spanish founders of civilization” in the Southwest, Spanish-speaking legislators were not about to let a built tribute to Indians stand at the center of town. Still more consequential was the inclination of Anglo developers and designers. Although Hewett and his colleagues were interested primarily in Native Americans, they saw something inspiring in the deeds of Spanish missionaries: they saw themselves. Just as they honored the Franciscans for bearing civilization to a savage land, they aimed to bring an ideal of manly civility to twentieth-century New Mexico. Along with tourist dollars, they were after prestige. By establishing institutions of art, science, and learning among the paisanos, they sought the stature of modern-day missionaries, the men who would bathe benighted New Mexico in the light of a modern civilization. And by building their institutions as monuments to the Franciscans, Hewett and his associates aimed to represent paisano New Mexico not as a place of farmers and laborers, poor and ill-educated, but as the setting of a timeless moral tale of Franciscan achievement.5 No one, of course, could dictate in 1917 how the new Santa Fe architecture would be interpreted in coming years. Some people saw only a tourist attraction or a handsome building. Others viewed it less as a Spanish achievement than as an expression of Native American tradition, and in fact the design eventually came to be known as Pueblo style. Similarly, as a legacy for modern New Mexico, the vague notion of manly Spanish civility had more than one practical meaning. To Hewett and his Republican allies, it called for a society led by Anglo men of education and property. To elite Hispanos, it demanded that Anglos respect los nativos as equal partners in public affairs. Just as racial tension rose in party politics after 1910, the competing notions of a Franciscan legacy produced friction among Anglo promoters and Spanish-speaking historians. Yet like the malleable term “Spanish-American,” the capaciousness of the mission ideal enabled wealthy and politically connected Anglos to appropriate Spanish symbols for their own purposes. Edgar Hewett recognized as much in his January 1919 address. Urging his Anglo audience to continue the hard work of civilization, he declared that

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“in her children, Spain is experiencing a new greatness,” one that should be “developed to the advantage and glory of New Mexico of today.” 6

Promoting New Mexico: Migrants, Tourists, and Indians The greatness Hewett sensed in 1919 followed years of unrewarding efforts to improve the image of New Mexico as a place in which to prosper. Back in 1880, the arrival of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe temporarily raised hopes that migration and business investment would soon accelerate. But even as the Anglo population mounted, the hopedfor boom never came. Development was hindered in several ways. The territory’s dry climate and fragmented irrigable plots thwarted largescale farming. Mines never yielded the riches of other western locales. And the Old Guard’s persistence in undervaluing corporate assets, coupled with widespread rural poverty, yielded a paper-thin tax base, one insufficient for construction of needed roads and schools. Looming above all other factors was the presence of los paisanos. Anchored to their land grants, mobilized by Hispano leaders, and accounting for roughly two-thirds of all territorial residents, the landowning villagers prompted potential migrants and investors to look for uncontested land titles in a more “American” field of opportunity. The territory’s dismal business outlook was summed up by Gen. William T. Sherman, who accompanied President Rutherford B. Hayes on a visit to New Mexico in October 1880. Having concluded six years earlier that Mexico should “take [the territory] back,” Sherman now offered only slightly more constructive advice. “You must get rid of your burros and goats . . . ,” he told an Hispano audience. “I hope ten years hence there will not be an adobe house in the Territory. . . . Yankees don’t like flat roofs, nor roofs of dirt.” 7 Well aware of New Mexico’s real and perceived shortcomings, the territorial legislature created the New Mexico Bureau of Immigration only a week after locomotives first reached Santa Fe. Staffed by twenty commissioners, most of them Anglo, the bureau disseminated printed matter on natural resources and economic opportunities. Like any advertiser, the bureau steered clear of social problems and racial conflicts. Nor did it highlight the presence of Hispanos, though it could not ignore them altogether. Publications that mentioned nativos devoted a few lines to predictable descriptions of an industrious, hospitable, and

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law-abiding people. They are “a reliable element to be employed in repelling Indian raids and suppressing domestic disorders,” one pamphlet noted. “[T]hey are seldom guilty of heinous crimes.” Another brochure even suggested that Hispano-occupied land grants, ordinarily considered an obstacle to homesteaders, in fact presented a golden opportunity: as they disintegrated, huge tracts of acreage would open up. Hispanos also represented a tourist attraction, though only in a very limited sense. Vying for the migrant and the investor, the bureau showed little interest in tourists, and in 1880 an organized tourist industry was not yet on the horizon. To add a touch of historical flavor, however, the most complete bureau publications devoted a few paragraphs to New Mexico’s natural scenery, prehistoric Indian sites, and Spanish conquistadors. Mention of Coronado or Cabeza de Vaca also put the modern “American” era in bold relief.8 As the bureau churned out statistics on minerals and rainfall, Anglo merchants and landowners in Santa Fe looked for a better way to attract attention. They had to find something. Once the thriving terminus of the Santa Fe Trail, later the territorial headquarters of the U.S. Army, the capital city had long been New Mexico’s center of commerce. Yet shortly after L. B. Prince’s speech at the railroad tracks, euphoria turned to dismay: owing to mountainous terrain, Santa Fe was left off the main line of the railroad, and the town was thereafter accessible only by a seventeen-mile spur. As new businesses sprouted up in Las Vegas and Albuquerque, Santa Feans sensed that their commercial position was deteriorating. After two years of hand-wringing, city promoters took action. Convinced that the territory’s rich history was their best asset, they organized the 1883 Tertio-Millennial Exposition, a forty-five-day extravaganza of outdoor games, horse and burro races, Native American dances, and historical reenactments, all staged in recognition of the “333rd anniversary” of the Spanish founding of Santa Fe. The organizers knew perfectly well that the first official Spanish colony was established in 1598, not 1550, and that Santa Fe was not founded until 1610. But none of that really mattered. To draw the attention of eastern newspapers, they chose a date that justified an elaborate commemoration, complete with a rousing, if chaotic, potpourri of historical costumes and tableaus. The only semblance of historical coherence came in late July, when organizers staged a trio of historical pageants, each of which was meant to recall the dramatic events of a single century. On the first two days, richly attired Spanish conquistadors and Franciscan priests shared the stage with Apaches, Zunis, and Pueblos. Day three, featur-

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ing the coming of American soldiers, brought spectators up to the modern period. If organizers strived for historical accuracy, they never let it get in the way of a good show. In one case they interrupted the first day’s stately procession of Spanish soldiers and Indian chiefs with the performance of the Thirteenth U.S. Infantry band.9 Amid what one observer called the “unique confusion” of the festival, the Spanish colonial era stood out as the beginning of New Mexico’s celebrated past. The period worthy of tribute began, as one newspaper put it, the year Spaniards established a “European civilization and Christian religion” at Santa Fe; whatever happened before that point was of little concern. Similarly, the colonial era served as a reference point for advertising pitches. Like carnival barkers, organizers erroneously informed spectators that Santa Fe, the “oldest town” in the United States, was also home to the nation’s oldest church and oldest house. Whether spectators objected to the commercial tone is unknown. Ironically, the only surviving words of disagreement came from the man whom organizers asked for a nod of approval. To raise the event’s profile, they had invited Walt Whitman to visit Santa Fe and deliver a poem on the significance of the “333rd anniversary.” Declining the honor, Whitman instead sent a letter extolling the virtues of the Spanish character in the Americas. He compared the “seething materialistic and business vortices” of contemporary times with “a nationality of noblest spiritual, heroic and democratic attributes” that might yet be established. It was the “excess” of an Anglo-Saxon stock that brought the nation to its current predicament, he wrote, and the grace of Spanish character that offered rejuvenation. After reading Whitman’s letter, organizers were probably just as glad he stayed home. They had no desire to see a reemergence of Hispanos in “broadest flow and permanent action.” They merely hoped to use historical dramas to attract somebody—anybody—to Santa Fe. And they looked forward to entering the same commercial whirlpool that Whitman deplored. Indeed, for all the festival’s spirited pageantry, the territory’s mineral, agricultural, and industrial potential was on full display in exhibition tents, and it claimed the largest type in promotional literature. In the crusade to boost Santa Fe, no enticement was spared.10 All to no avail. Financially, the Tertio-Millennial flopped. The few Anglo spectators it managed to attract proved far less interested in minerals and real estate than in the sights and sounds of Native Americans, roughly one thousand of whom took part in the pageant. Fairgoers delighted in the clothing of Zunis and Apaches, the Pueblos’ ceremonial

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dances, and the mock battles all tribes staged with army soldiers.11 Far from an isolated phenomenon, the interest in New Mexico’s Indians was symptomatic of a national trend. As Indian peoples throughout the West were defeated in battle and forced onto reservations, they reacquired in Anglo eyes the romantic qualities once depicted in American art and literature. Like observers elsewhere, some spectators at the Tertio-Millennial undoubtedly saw Indian warriors and hunters as delightfully primitive figures. Holding weapons and attired in buckskin, the Indians appeared as savages of noble, vigorous, and racially pure bearing.12 Other onlookers may have been gratified simply to see the Indians who had recently fought the U.S. Army. One group of participants, the Mescalero Apaches, had ceased hostilities only a year earlier. Still other Anglos found in Indian tribes an element of mystery and oriental exoticism. Such was particularly true of the Pueblos, who, as one scholar notes, had long qualified as “semi-civilized” in Anglo eyes.13 During the 1880s, a veritable cult formed around the Legend of Montezuma, a myth of the Aztec emperor that recast the Pueblos as descendants of a fallen southwestern nobility. The well-known fable told of Montezuma’s departure from the Pueblo community of Aztlán, his journey southward to the Valley of Mexico, and the founding of his imperial capital, Tenochtitlán, at the site where he witnessed an eagle clutching a serpent.14 In 1885 William G. Ritch, president of the Bureau of Immigration, put the Montezuma legend front and center by titling the bureau’s main publication Aztlán and opening an otherwise standard description of farms and mines with a complete recounting of the fabled journey. As secretary of New Mexico Territory, Ritch also made the image of eagle and serpent (sheltered by a larger American eagle) the principal motif in New Mexico’s territorial seal. The following year, the governor of New Mexico, Democrat Edmund Ross, took the nickname Montezuma to celebrate his triumph. In 1888 Susan Wallace, wife of former governor Lew Wallace, evoked the legend of Montezuma in her romantic account of New Mexico, Land of the Pueblos. And in 1889, to the dismay of Hispanos, a statehood bill proposed that the name of New Mexico be changed to Montezuma. None of the references indicate a wellspring of Anglo respect for the Pueblo people. What they suggest is a proclivity to draw on Indian rather than Hispano lore for indigenous symbols. In the 1880s, still outnumbering Anglos by roughly eight to one, “Mexican” farmers and sheepherders presented an obstacle to be overcome. Indians, now almost fully under Anglo-American control, were ready to be observed, studied, and even glorified.15

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A lucrative tourist market was just around the corner. Organizers of the Tertio-Millennial did not fully appreciate its value, nor were they equipped to exploit it. Far better situated was the railroad, although it too was slow to take advantage. The first transcontinental passengers of the 1870s tended to overlook native tribes in favor of the West’s stunning natural scenery. In the Southwest, although evidence suggests that railroad builders were at least contemplating the value of Indian attractions in the early 1880s, the region’s principal line, the Santa Fe, was designed to get freight and passengers to destinations as quickly as possible. The company’s advertisement of New Mexico closely resembled material published by the Bureau of Immigration, with the standard promotion of mining, farming, and commercial opportunities.16 The discovery of an Indian tourist market came only after the Santa Fe Railroad was reorganized and given a new marketing strategy in the 1890s. Under the guidance of William H. Simpson, the new corporation, now known as the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railway, decided to make money by slowing passengers down. To afford them a convenient experience of the Native American Southwest, the company constructed large hotels and elaborate Indian art and jewelry markets at southwestern depots. The hotels and concessions were administered by the Fred Harvey Company, which established an Indian Department in 1902 to coordinate the buying and selling of objects, the exhibition of actual Indian craftspeople, and the publication of souvenir literature. Two decades later, when automobile travel became practical, the company sent tourists on motor tours of nearby pueblos and ruins. Thus supported by the railroad, tourism in turn-of-the-century New Mexico was transformed from a haphazard excursion among curio shops into a wellorchestrated encounter of Native American cultures.17

Commemorating Spain in Southern California Railroad tourism inevitably raised the possibility of marketing New Mexico’s Spanish colonial past. As visitors lined up to see real Indians, promoters in Santa Fe recognized the ruins of mission churches as tourist attractions in their own right. Yet the connection between the railroad and a Spanish heritage was indirect: the line of influence ran first to southern California. Tributes to New Mexico’s Franciscan missionaries were heard only after writers and civic boosters on the West Coast had begun to praise their own mission fathers. Similarly, the so-called

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Santa Fe Style of architecture took form only after southern California had developed its own mission design. New Mexico’s promoters, it seems, did not appreciate the potential rewards until California turned a profit. One thing they did recognize was the upper Rio Grande’s historical distinctiveness. Intent on commemorating the unique achievements of New Mexico’s Franciscans, they adapted California’s mission ideal to their own purposes. They took a southern California idyll of natural and human benevolence and transformed it into a New Mexican narrative of struggle, one in which manly missionaries performed the hard work of civilizing a savage wilderness. At the heart of California’s Spanish revival was a paean to pastoral ranchos and gracious missions, mediated through print, art, and architecture. The revival’s beginning is often associated with the 1884 publication of Ramona, Helen Hunt Jackson’s sentimental novel of innocent Indians and callous whites. Jackson did not set out to glorify a Spanish past. Like Century of Dishonor, her 1881 indictment of U.S. Indian policy, Ramona was meant to arouse a nation to the mistreatment of California’s Native Americans. But the exhortation went largely unheard. The book was instead taken by contemporary readers as a tribute to a Spanish colonial romance, one to which the author herself was apparently drawn as she visited the ruins of Spanish missions. For Jackson, the source of the nostalgic glow was a warm and enriching Catholicism. It was the same spirit, Jackson asserted in an 1883 article, that spurred “kindly” padres to care for “savage” Indians. Even amid the changes wrought by Anglo newcomers, Jackson discovered a legacy of Catholic warmth. In Ramona she embodied the Catholic spirit in a fictional estate modeled on the del Valles’ Rancho Camulos just north of Los Angeles. There the scenes Jackson described—wooden crosses set on surrounding hills, the quiet reverence of the family chapel— exuded nostalgia for a more orderly time.18 Ramona has always been a very popular book. Having gone through more than three hundred English-language editions, it ranks among America’s all-time bestsellers. Even in the late 1880s the story reached the level of minor myth. As towns and localities sought recognition as the places Jackson wrote about, a spate of books, pamphlets, and magazine articles stated competing cases. Thus Ramona’s Homeland, naming San Diego, went head to head with “Rancho Guajome: The Real Home of Ramona” and The Home of Ramona, which backed Rancho Camulos. Then there is the Ramona Pageant, a performance put on by the town of Hemet. Begun in the 1920s and still thriving today, it ac-

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commodated nearly two hundred thousand well-dressed spectators in its first twelve seasons.19 Such enthusiasm cannot be explained by Ramona alone. The book became a legend only because Jackson and her audience came under the influence of southern California’s larger literary and social contexts. For one thing, Jackson was not the only author to present a pastoral Spanish California. In the 1860s Bret Harte was already spinning stories of well-bred “Castilian” characters in “Spanish” settings. Roughly coincident with Jackson, the writers Grace Ellery Channing and Charles Dudley Warner depicted southern California as America’s Mediterranean, a world of sunshine, clear light, and outdoor living, where even former midwestern corn farmers, here growers of citrus and grapes, could enjoy a relatively civilized, middle-class life.20 Nor could Jackson, a stranger to the region, rely on unmediated insight. As she toured southern California in the early eighties, she counted on the seasoned observations of her guides, the Coronel and del Valle families among them. It is noteworthy that Jackson’s principal tour in 1882 –83 coincided with preparations for the centennial anniversary observance of Fray Junípero Serra’s death, a project in which both Antonio Coronel and Reginald Francisco del Valle were deeply involved. Both men honored, in the words of Coronel, “the merits and sacrifices of the first fathers” and “the morals and civilization” instilled by a man whose work ensured that “Spain should not lose this country.” In short, Jackson’s own view of southern California’s land and people was inevitably colored by an esteem for European parallels and antecedents, an esteem that stirred the imaginations of both Anglo writers and the Spanish-speaking gentry.21 Of equal bearing on the trajectory of the Ramona myth was southern California’s explosive growth. As in other western locales, boom times came with the railroad. Although high passenger rates initially discouraged transcontinental travel, a fare war between the Santa Fe and the Southern Pacific in 1887 set off a westward stampede. Along with tourists anxious to see America’s new paradise came a larger body of migrants and speculators, some of whom bought housing lots site unseen. The population of Los Angeles, having hovered just above 11,000 through the early 1880s, jumped to 70,000 in three years. Although the so-called Boom of the Eighties collapsed in 1888, L.A. was not down for long. Between 1890 and 1907, the city’s population grew from 50,000 to 250,000.22 Fueling the expansion was an enormous volume of public and private publicity. Pamphlets, books, articles, poems, guides, and newspaper editorials were rapidly churned out by civic boosters, travel

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writers, and land and railroad companies. Eastern publications such as Harper’s, Atlantic Monthly, and Scribner’s were especially eager to run articles on America’s Pacific wonderland. Closer to home, towns such as Santa Barbara, Pasadena, and Glendale got into the act. In the twelve years after 1888, the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce alone issued thirty-five separate pamphlets, with a total circulation estimated at 800,000. Intent on appealing to a broad audience, advertising compendiums did not dwell exclusively on California’s past. Rather, in pitching all manner of opportunities, they evoked Spanish colonial days to accent a town’s salubrious climate, natural abundance, or civilized ambience. The imagery was nothing if not versatile. To a young Mary Austin, having lived previously in the more contemplative settings of Carmel and the Owens Valley, it seemed that “almost the whole expressive energy of California” was being put toward a “factitious effort . . . to re-create a sense of the past.” 23 Some pitchmen made direct use of the Ramona mania. “It is Spain once more,” declared one travel guide, “and near by so it seems, there must be the Alhambra or an ancient city. But it is America, and California, and better yet, it is the home of Ramona.” The more common tactic was to cast an otherwise unremarkable locality in the aura of nearby mission ruins. As the most tangible remnants of an earlier age in places now being surveyed by Anglo developers, the crumbling missions afforded both picturesque sites to the tourist and an abiding ambience to the new home owner. Remembering the soft tolling of mission bells and untiring devotion of the Franciscan fathers, writers described an “idyllic beauty” and “sweet repose of the old.” “Here it was,” announced one pamphlet on the San Gabriel Valley, “that all those gracious influences which foster and enrich society, and make life worth living . . . have since made this the most delightful part of California. Here, on September 1, 1771, over one hundred years ago, the Franciscan friars . . . inspired by loving zeal for the good of men, established the Mission San Gabriel.” 24 The one drawback of such reflections was the attention they might throw on less desirable features of California society: the forlorn Indians whose ancestors once occupied the missions and the growing number of ethnic Mexicans, the “dark, grave-faced people, who sit in doorways” surrounding the actual mission buildings. Promoters responded, in essence, by blaming one blemish on the other. Extolling the selflessness of Spain’s mission fathers, under whose guidance the Indian “fared so sumptuously,” boosters attributed his decline to the ruinous greed of Mexican leaders after 1821. In secularizing the missions, the Mexican

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government had expelled the kindly padres and exploited the childlike native, thereby driving a historic wedge between the American era and a past worthy of honor.25 Helen Hunt Jackson died in August 1885. Earlier that year the man who would replace her as chief medium of days past appeared in Los Angeles. He was Charles F. Lummis. Between 1900 and his death in 1928, Lummis embodied more than any single person the spirit of California’s Spanish revival, although that was not his only talent. Born in Massachusetts in 1859, Lummis mastered classical languages and history before matriculating at Harvard. There he met Theodore Roosevelt, and, like the well-to-do New Yorker, he sought to test his masculine hardiness after graduation by pitting body and spirit against the American West.26 In 1884 he set out on foot from Ohio to Los Angeles, sending weekly dispatches to the West Coast for publication in the Los Angeles Times. Arriving at his destination after 112 days, broken arm in a sling, he took up a reporting job with the newspaper and worked feverishly to cover the turbulent events of the boom. The work nearly killed him. After suffering a paralytic stroke, he left Los Angeles for New Mexico, where, at the home of the illustrious Col. Manuel Chaves in San Mateo, he recuperated by forcing his body through a daily regimen of hunting, fishing, and exploring with Chaves’s sons, Amado and Ireneo. By the early 1890s he had recovered enough strength to take on an everchanging array of challenges. A prodigious photographer, a writer of numerous books on the Southwest, an editor of the Los Angeles publication Land of Sunshine (renamed Out West in 1901), an amateur historian and archaeologist, a civic steward and preservationist, and, last but not least, a tireless promoter of Spanish tradition, Lummis demands his own book-length study, one that places his many motives in their turnof-the-century setting.27 The point that bears mention here is Lummis’s perception of a dual Spanish legacy, one that combined masculine striving and feminine sentimentalism. Consciously, and very publicly, Lummis articulated a masculine ideal. In California’s Spanish past he found a distinctly manly example of courage and service. In the deeds of the Franciscan fathers he heard an exhortation for the modern day, a call to build turn-of-thecentury southern California into the new center of American civilization. As journalist, writer, founder of the Southwest Museum, business promoter, and even city librarian, Lummis could claim that he answered the call. Yet he also believed that the mission fathers could continue to inspire only if their message was kept historically pure, unadulterated by

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the cloying artifice he identified as the missions’ feminine appeal. He drew a sharp distinction between hard-edged historical reality, which commanded men to strive for civilization, and the “gospel of sissies and sentimentalism,” which he associated, for example, with the cult of Ramona. The true Spanish past, he bellowed, is not a contrivance of literature. Nor is it a maudlin tale of Catholic piety told to tourists at a mission ruin. It is rather the inspiring legacy of the conquistadors, “the two-fisted gospel of the men who have made the world nobler by their words.” Sentimentalism and artifice, Lummis seemed to say, fed insidiously on each other, and they were equally alien to the manly realm of the courageous Franciscans, in whose memory a modern southern California could find sustenance.28 Yet the wall Lummis built between masculine striving and feminine artifice could not hold. The two spheres inevitably came together, and nowhere was their union more evident than in the promoter’s own life. Lummis became the unofficial leader of the Spanish revival largely because he combined solid public achievements with an idiosyncratic and contrived “Spanish” persona. His published works, including A New Mexico David (1891), The Spanish Pioneers (1893), and Flowers of Our Lost Romance (1929), alerted his reading audience to the heroism of Spanish conquistadors and the lasting imagination, chivalry, and “warm humanity” of their descendants.29 Similarly, his leadership of the Landmarks Club called attention to the deterioration of actual mission buildings. At home, “Don Carlos” lived the part of the modern, semiurban Spanish colonist. Over a fifteen-year span he and his Indian assistants took crude tools and built his own Spanish hacienda, El Alisal, from the mud and stones of the Arroyo Seco, just a few miles from downtown Los Angeles. Donning the costume of a caballero and strumming a guitar, he entertained the area’s leading writers and actors with his collection of “old, old Spanish songs.” At a time when the ranchos of the “noble old Spanish families” were becoming “gringoized,” El Alisal was the refuge of “the spirit of Old California.” What Lummis refused to recognize was that his own domestic Spanish style, so divorced from the hum of modern Los Angeles just down the Arroyo, was as much a contrivance as Ramona itself.30 Then, too, there was the problem of tourism. By the turn of the century, the marketing of the missions had necessarily mixed sentiment, if not quite sentimentalism, with the manly world of commerce. Lummis, booster that he was, could not ignore the material rewards. On the contrary, he constantly preached the need to harness sentiment for business

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profits. At the end of his life he made the point by recalling the words of John S. Mitchell, president of the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce, who in 1916 had spoken to a crowd of seven thousand at Mission San Fernando. We business men, who like to think we are shrewd and far-seeing, have long been blind. It took us a great while to realize that the Old Missions had anything but sentimental interest. . . . we realize today that the old missions are worth more money, are a greater asset to southern california than our oil, our oranges, even our climate [Lummis’s emphasis].31

What Lummis hoped, and perhaps fervently believed, was that the missions could serve the interests of commerce by stirring the imaginations of men who visited them, inspiring them to greater achievement. Memorializing courage and sacrifice, the ruins would exhort visitors to rededicate themselves to a life of learning and service. What he feared, and what gradually came to pass, was the steady debasement of the Spanish ideal. As tourism and the trade in real estate rapidly expanded, the commandments of the padres diminished into the common appeals of the pitchman, and the lesson of labor for civilization dissipated in the leisurely California sun. Nothing came to exemplify that debasement as much as southern California’s ubiquitous mission architecture. Just before the turn of the century, a style known as Mission Revival gained immense popularity in and around Los Angeles.32 Flourishing between 1895 and 1910, the style’s emergence was not unrelated to the national fascination with Spanish-themed design. So-called Spanish Renaissance, for example, a grandiose aesthetic of great domes, spires, and colonnades, was made the official style at Buffalo’s Pan-American Exposition in 1901. California’s Mission Revival also partook of the exotic, but its scale was comparatively modest and its character homegrown. Rooted in the picturesque appeal of California’s mission churches, Mission Revival came into being as a fully articulated design only after rhetorical references to graceful ranchos and Franciscan missions turned up on the pages of southern California’s publicity literature. The style’s power was recognized immediately. With its capacity to arrest newcomers’ attention and refigure public spaces, the striking architecture soon eclipsed the more mundane printed tributes to Franciscan pioneers. By 1900 southern California’s Spanish revival was a decidedly visual phenomenon.33 Exactly what it conveyed to onlookers depended on what was built.

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The first project to deliberately draw on mission features was the design of Stanford University, undertaken jointly in the late 1880s by the Boston firm Shepley, Rutan and Coolidge, the landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, and Leland Stanford himself. Although the project relied on a Romanesque base, such missionlike elements as arched openings, arcades, red-tiled roofs, and enclosed patios advanced Stanford’s aim of creating a uniquely Californian institution, one whose graduates, following Lummis’s model, “may in a measure become missionaries to spread correct ideas of civilization.” 34 In the 1890s the mission style split into northern and southern variants. In keeping with the gargantuan California Building at Chicago’s 1893 Columbian Exposition, a San Francisco style adapted Moorish associations, with towers, domes, and minarets. Southern California gravitated toward more subdued designs. Often applied to one-story structures, the arched windows, arcaded porches, and tiled roofs of the Los Angeles area were especially suited to the smaller scale of private residences. In 1898, when the conservative publisher of the Los Angeles Times, Harrison Gray Otis, moved into a Mission Revival house—his wife called it an “old-new” type of “Spanish style”—the switch to stucco and red tile could no longer be considered the leap of the avant-garde.35 Indeed, although it competed with other designs, few turn-of-thecentury Los Angelenos found fault with Mission Revival, at least initially. Lummis was one of its many supporters. At Land of Sunshine he ran a series of articles on the appropriateness of the style to southern California’s climate and history. He also recognized its function as an eye-catching promotion of the region, one achieved most successfully in railway depots built by the Santa Fe and the Southern Pacific. After 1900 the two companies erected elaborate mission-style stations throughout the Southwest, including New Mexico. Yet as Lummis and others eventually realized, Mission Revival was a style without limits. At first embodied in institutional structures that could reasonably make reference to “civilization,” such as public schools and libraries, the style quickly proliferated into designs for office buildings, warehouses, and even filling stations. Rather than represent Lummis’s manly race of civilizers, or even Jackson’s pious Catholicism, the mission design dissipated into an amorphous set of visual details, fit for practically any use. By 1923, with southern California well on its way to erecting more than one million buildings in mission style, Lummis saw a good thing gone bad. “[M]ost of the so-called ‘Mission Style’ now going up all over California isn’t Mission at all,” he thundered, “nor at all architecture, but obvious, awkward and detestable fake.” 36

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Tourism and Architecture in New Mexico New Mexicans were not as quick to capitalize on a history of courageous missionaries. Throughout the 1890s, as publicists and architects in Los Angeles drew up their plans, territorial promoters largely ignored New Mexico’s mission ruins. The difference in setting was partly to blame. Located in a dry land, the ruins of Pecos or Acoma had little in common with picturesque scenes at Santa Barbara or San Juan Capistrano. Nor were they found near sizable cities. Unlike boosters of Santa Barbara or the San Gabriel Valley, civic leaders in Santa Fe and Albuquerque had little incentive to draw attention to crumbling walls on existing or abandoned Indian pueblos, well out of town. Such structures were certainly not lacking in historical worth. Considerably older than the ruins in California, their years of endurance through drought and Indian revolt lent them an uncommonly dramatic air. With sufficient financial backing, an organization such as the Bureau of Immigration might have exploited these qualities. But like all public institutions in New Mexico, the bureau was financially strapped. Its promotional efforts could not begin to approach those of southern California. Looking back on his experiences from 1934, one member recalled his frustrations. [T]he New Mexico Bureau of Immigration . . . taught me the futility of [advertising]. . . . The returns as far as I could ever learn were not commensurate with the expenditures. . . . After all, in that sort of a thing, New Mexico must compete with states like California which have one hundred dollars to expend in advertising and exhibits, to every possible dollar that we could appropriate [sic].37

The lament was voiced by Paul A. F. Walter, who by 1934 had enjoyed a varied career in journalism, in banking, and in exhorting fellow citizens to honor the Franciscans. Having arrived in New Mexico in 1899, the astute Pennsylvania native took the measure of New Mexico’s political culture and immediately aligned himself with its powerful Republican Old Guard. Working under Max Frost, the ailing owner of the Santa Fe New Mexican, Walter assumed de facto direction of the bureau’s promotional mission. Unlike most bureau members, Walter cultivated a keen interest in artistic and historical pursuits, and he quickly grasped the potential value of the territory’s rich Spanish colonial past.38 His first experiment in tapping it appeared in the bureau’s 1904 publication, Land of Sunshine, a promotional guide distributed at St. Louis’s Louisiana Purchase Exposition. Like earlier bureau publications, Land of Sunshine was geared largely to selling the territory’s industries, resources, and salubrious climate. It aimed to portray a “New

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Mexico of Today” rather than “a land of relics and curios.” Walter nonetheless stepped out of the mold by telling readers why New Mexico’s missions bested the celebrated ruins of the Pacific Coast. California’s oldest church, he wrote, its “most venerated historic monument” and its “beginning of civilization,” was not constructed until 1769, more than a century after New Mexico’s first mission was founded.39 If, by 1900, the hazy association of “civilization” and the Franciscan missions had grown thoroughly conventional, Walter was the first New Mexican booster to connect the aspirations of modern-day Anglos and the achievements of colonial missionaries. Hewing close to Lummis’s ideal of manly fortitude, he suggested that the ideal of overcoming a hostile environment was especially appropriate to New Mexico’s less forgiving setting of fearsome Indians and dry soils. Calling the missions “monuments” to the Franciscan fathers, the “pioneers of Christianity and civilization,” he drew a parallel between the determined missionary and the turn-of-the-century Anglo pioneer, both of whom regarded New Mexico as an inhospitable frontier. And he justified that parallel by comparing the missions to monuments of British colonization. Pointing out that the Spanish had arrived in the Southwest before “the coming of the Mayflower and the settlement of Jamestown,” he suggested that like Plymouth and Jamestown, missions at Pecos, Santo Domingo, and Acoma represented the monumental beginnings of a southwestern civilization, one considerably older than any Spanish settlement on the West Coast.40 Yet even as Walter presented New Mexico in a unique light, public and private promoters of the territory borrowed from California. Walter’s reflections in 1904 coincided with the debut of the territory’s first mission-style building at a national exposition—a building that bore suspicious resemblance to California designs. The source of New Mexico’s architectural inspiration was the railroad. Lacking a distinctive Spanish colonial design of their own, managers of New Mexico’s exhibit at St. Louis chose the approximate style adopted by the Santa Fe Railway and the Harvey Company for the territory’s new railside buildings. That design was based on southern California’s wildly successful Mission Revival. The most prominent railroad structure was the grand Alvarado Hotel, built at Albuquerque between 1901 and 1904. With electric lights and private baths, the Alvarado offered visitors the most modern conveniences. Yet with its stucco walls, tiled roofs, and arcaded patio, it also aimed, in the words of a Fred Harvey brochure, “to revive the Spanish tradition and thereby make the whole Southwest history-conscious.” 41

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The structure’s more practical, if less lyrical, function was advertising. By building hotels and depots in the bright California style, the Santa Fe Railway connected thematically the out-of-the-way towns along its route and reminded passengers of what awaited them at the end of the line. Because the railway operated tourist hotels and sold real estate in southern California, it had good reason to keep paid passengers under the spell of Spanish romance. A grand hotel such as the Alvarado also had a less obvious role. One might wonder why the Santa Fe Railway built hotels in the Mission Revival style if the company made money by marketing imagery of Native Americans. Would not a pseudo-Pueblo structure be more appropriate and exciting? Actually, two such buildings took shape shortly after 1900. The Cliffs Dwellers, a mock-up of a Pueblo village, appeared at the St. Louis Exposition in 1904. The next year Hopi House, a composite replica of buildings at Oraibi, Arizona, welcomed tourists to the Grand Canyon. Both structures catered to vistors who sought moments of rough-hewn and exotic adventure. Initially, for example, the upper floors of Hopi House were occupied by Hopi craftsmen, and visitors were urged to “[g]o inside and see how these gentle folk live.” 42 For less adventuresome crosscountry passengers, especially those who left the train with some reluctance at Albuquerque, a different sort of accommodation was called for. The Alvarado may have offered genteel tourists the chance to encounter Indian objects and craftspeople, but it did so under staged conditions. Along with meeting high standards of luxury, the hotel replicated the historic dualism of refined missionary and uncultivated native. Just as the missionary had beheld the uncouth native, so now the tourist stood close to yet apart from the backward New Mexican environment, within arm’s reach of the Indian yet only a few steps from a fine hotel. The Alvarado’s light-toned walls and red-tiled roofs, set against a landscape of crumbling mud houses, assured travelers the chance to experience native New Mexico within the comforting sight of a turn-of-the-century “mission.” 43 Ironically, the railroad hotel design had less aesthetic impact on Albuquerque or Las Vegas, the towns where they were built, than on rival Santa Fe. By 1910, as Albuquerque continued to attract migrants and capital, southern California’s success in marketing Mission Revival encouraged Santa Fe’s leaders to consider transforming the capital city. They had little to lose. Left off the main railroad line in 1880, Santa Fe had slipped into economic decline. Over the next thirty years, as New Mexico’s population increased by more than two and a half times, Santa Fe’s population fell by 23 percent. Staying away from the “adobe town,”

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midwestern migrants flocked to Las Vegas and Albuquerque, relocating town centers beside the rails and turning onetime Hispano settlements into bustling places of Anglo commerce. As the new railroad towns enjoyed a constant flow of trade, Santa Fe remained in a commercial eddy. In 1910 its decline was summed up by a local headline: “Where Santa Fe Lost Out.” 44 Commercial stagnation also had unfortunate racial and political consequences. In the eyes of newcomers accustomed to Las Vegas or Albuquerque, Santa Fe was not an “American city,” and Anglo legislators tried repeatedly before the turn of the century to move the territorial capital to a more favorable spot. “Santa Fe is an out of the way place,” remarked the Lordsburg Western Liberal in 1892, “[and the] population of the town is largely Mexican. The Capital of a modern state should be in an American town.” Such comments traumatized Santa Feans and angered Hispanos throughout the territory, for losing the capital meant more than giving up the town’s main source of revenue. Because the city’s history and character were so thoroughly bound up with Spanishspeaking New Mexico, a Santa Fe capital symbolized Hispanos’ centrality in governing the territory. “What, sir, could be more appropriate than to maintain the seat of government here, where De Vargas left the reconquered country?” the Rio Abajo’s senator, J. Francisco Chaves, had asked in 1885. “Every inch of this soil is enriched by the blood of our brave ancestors.” Chaves and others gained temporary relief in 1898, when Congress declared Santa Fe the permanent territorial capital. But with the approach of statehood and the simultaneous growth of New Mexico’s Anglo population, the issue was far from settled.45 The turmoil was aggravated by divided opinion within Santa Fe. As early as the Tertio-Millennial, civic leaders had confronted two seemingly divergent paths, one leading toward an “up-to-date” city, fully congenial to the business investor, the other turning backward, to a town pervaded by the mystique of its three centuries, a place where tourists, and perhaps only tourists, would feel completely at home. Paul Walter, having trumpeted the territory’s modern character while working for the Bureau of Immigration, set forth a similar prescription for the capital city. He argued that only by enlarging its population, increasing its business revenues, and cleaning up its image—removing manure heaps from the central plaza, for instance— could Santa Fe be saved. A Santa Fe Board of Trade publication written by Walter asserted that Santa Fe was ancient but hardly sleepy and like other towns was “fully abreast of modern progress.” 46 Meanwhile, other officials, and

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Walter himself, toyed with schemes for promoting the town’s quiet, restful, and even aged character. As early as 1881 Bureau of Immigration president Ritch had predicted that Santa Fe’s picturesque setting would “bring pleasure-seekers crossing the continent.” In the 1890s brochures advertised the city’s obvious appeal to sufferers of pulmonary consumption. And after the turn of the century, the phenomenal success of Los Angeles in attracting visitors (more than 100,000 from the East and Midwest in 1906, for example) prompted a new campaign for tourist dollars. What Los Angeles demonstrated, the well-known California booster Col. David C. Collier told a Santa Fe audience, was that tourism was not inconsistent with other forms of business. On the contrary, the two paths to development were really one, both being governed by “the inevitable law that the colonist and the investor follow the tourist.” Just as Los Angeles had succeeded in “capital[izing] its climate and old missions,” Colonel Collier predicted, Santa Fe would profit enormously from its own attractions.47 Just what these attractions might be was not immediately clear. In 1910 Santa Fe comprised a few thousand people, many small adobe houses, and a few clusters of commercial buildings. It lacked the established tourist sites of southern California, not to mention numerous hotels, dining establishments, and a transportation network. Immediately after New Mexico attained statehood, in March 1912, Santa Fe mayor Arthur Seligman created the Santa Fe Planning Board to put together a strategy for improving the town’s appearance. Soliciting ideas from planning experts as far away as Berlin, the board was advised to follow principles of the City Beautiful movement. In keeping with turn-of-thecentury progressive reforms, the movement aimed to untangle the chaos of urban life by creating large parks, broad boulevards, and majestic public buildings designed in a unifying style, most commonly Beaux Arts classicism. The board weighed such steps carefully, but it lacked both the resources and the will to perform radical surgery. It opted instead for a hybrid approach, preserving the town’s narrow, crooked streets (once compared to a “stampede of snakes through a great mud hole”) while imposing a more homogeneous theme, one based on “the old Spanish type of architecture” of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Just as Mission Revival had taken hold in Los Angeles, adobe architecture would bring about Santa Fe’s renaissance. “Every effort will be directed toward making Santa Fe the Tourist Center of the Southwest,” one official wrote to the Santa Fe Railway’s W. H. Simpson. “[A]nd the insistence on the native or ‘Santa Fe’ note

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in all future architecture here seems to me the surest way to attract the tourist wearied from the brick, wood and concrete construction of the east. We hope to make of Santa Fe a glorified Adobe Town.” 48 Some steps toward that goal were relatively simple. One proposal was to effect a more “Spanish” atmosphere by changing the names of city streets, for example, Grant Avenue to Paseo Coronado, Telephone Road to Camino del Monte Sol, and Montezuma Avenue to Camino De Vargas.49 The decision to unify Santa Fe’s architecture with the humble adobe was more risky. Although some tourists might relish the chance to bunk in a “mud house,” countless New Mexicans in and out of the capital mocked the “dobe,” the enduring symbol of Santa Fe’s economic stagnation. For decades, a pattern of such ridicule had prompted calls for modernization. At first the goal was simply to widen windows and doorways. Then, as materials became available, city officials exhorted residents to replace mud roofs with shingles or tin. After 1880, with the availability of milled lumber, brick, quarried stone, and cast iron, business and home owners rebuilt whole structures as Italianate commercial houses and Queen Anne–style bungalows. By the end of the century, the town was at last taking on the desired appearance. Santa Fe’s “lethargy has been cast off,” noted the local newspaper in 1891, and “day by day she makes gigantic strides in the ranks of progress.” The planning board’s 1912 decision to embrace the adobe thus stood to reverse a half century of stylistic momentum.50 In truth, the board never adopted the actual adobe residence as a prototype. Dwellings of Hispano laborers and woodcutters were far too humble for the kind of visitors the city sought. Unlike Los Angeles and even Santa Barbara, both of which were accessible through direct rail and shipping connections, Santa Fe faced a future of relative isolation. Even under the best conditions, it could not count on a steady stream of sight-seers, much less migrants. It modified its pitch accordingly. Rather than cater to “the great horde of so-called tourists who pass westward each year,” the city aimed to attract “the better sort of travelers,” the people of means and leisure who explored exotic places, perhaps with an eye to remaining.51 An elite clientele naturally demanded high-end accommodation. If well-to-do migrants happened to fall in love with the basic elements of the traditional adobe—mud bricks, warm earth tones, and soft lines—they would undoubtedly want modern conveniences and elaborate hand-fashioned details. At the turn of the century most adobe houses in New Mexico fell short of that standard. They lacked indoor plumbing, porches, and even hallways. Rooms

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were small and dark, lit only by candles and the glow of a fire, with packed dirt floors and little furniture, while exterior walls were constantly sagging and eroding. The homes of a “residence and resort city,” by contrast, required large windows, wood or tiled floors, white walls, hand-carved furniture, ornamental fixtures, and a smooth exterior finish. Such “up-to-date” adobes would articulate what the board only alluded to—that Santa Fe was discarding the appearance of a nineteenthcentury Mexican town and creating a twentieth-century look of order and refinement, what the board called the Santa Fe Style.52 By mid-1912 the board had made the Santa Fe Style its key to economic revival. Members had not, however, decided what the visual design should actually be. Confronted with scores of architectural layouts and details, they assigned the problem of formulating the new look to twenty-nine-year-old Sylvanus Morley, a Harvard-trained archaeologist. Having first arrived in the Southwest for fieldwork in 1907, Morley would later attain eminence as an authority on Mayan civilization. In 1912 he applied his characteristic energy and precision to sorting through photographs and drawings of adobe buildings in and around Santa Fe. The task was surprisingly difficult. Identifying a suitable style was not simply a matter of happening upon the perfect building or even assembling a composite of details. For one thing, Morley sought an architecture that worked well for both residential and larger structures, including hotels and commercial buildings. He also recognized the importance of avoiding any resemblance to a California mission style, particularly the well-known Mission Revival. A derivative form would only diminish New Mexico in the eyes of visitors. Finally, in seeking a design rooted in New Mexico soil, Morley also looked for an architecture with a historical narrative, a dramatic story that connected a present-day house or hotel with New Mexico’s grand past. With its capacity to unify buildings of different size and function, and to inspire a following of residents and visitors, the narrative was no less important than aesthetic appeal.53 Morley found his quarry in, of all places, a rather plain adobe warehouse. Situated alongside the railroad tracks in northeastern New Mexico, the smooth, massive, and uncluttered building appealed to him far more than the Santa Fe Railway’s highly ornamented hotels. Morley did not say so in his letters, but he undoubtedly realized that the building, “so absolutely in the spirit of ‘The Santa Fe Style,’” was modeled on the famous church of Mission San Estevan at Acoma Pueblo, the only mission church to survive the Pueblo Revolt of 1680. Standing high

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atop the Acoma acropolis, it was without doubt the single most arresting monument to Spanish colonization. The church bore both the profound architectural simplicity and narrative power that Morley had in mind.54 What inspired Morley, as he would later make clear, was the endurance of a European spirit in a primitive New Mexico environment. Like any mission building, of course, the church at Acoma was not the achievement of Spaniards alone. As the principal builders, Pueblo Indians collaborated in devising techniques of construction, most notably in the application of adobe. Morley referred to the collaboration as a fusion of Spanish and Pueblo forms, a “graft[ing] of a European civilization on a native American stalk.” Yet, to Morley, fusion did not imply contribution in equal parts. On the contrary, superior Spanish craftsmanship and the formal qualities it made possible represented the insights of a “higher civilization.” Morley understood the difference in the evolutionary terms so familiar to him and his colleagues. Pueblo buildings, he believed, befit the simple needs of a communal people. Heavy, dark, and monotonous, their multistoried adobe houses stood as “human ant hills” for individuals “completely submerged in the community.” Spanish settlers, Morley observed, required a more sophisticated and diversified architecture. Representing a “civilization of highly specialized needs,” they adapted the Pueblos’ ungainly design to structures that fit a variety of domestic, governmental, and ecclesiastical functions. Most notably, they lightened Indian dwellings, in both senses of the term. Exterior porches, cloistered courts, and balconies relieved cavelike Indian dwellings, infusing them with sunlight. Simultaneously, the details unburdened adobe dwellings of their native weight, achieving an aesthetic that transcended primitive surroundings.55

Architecture and Civilization For all Morley’s enthusiasm, at the end of 1912 the Santa Fe Style remained a concept on the drawing board. Until it was adapted to actual buildings, few residents would get behind it. Some would never be won over. As late as 1919, seventy-nine-year-old Thomas B. Catron criticized designers for putting “more money on the outside than on the inside” of La Fonda, Santa Fe’s new and highly stylized adobe hotel. “[We want a] plain, substantial one,” Catron thundered, “four stories or more with good elevators.” 56 Yet by the time Catron spoke, he was nearly the last of a dying breed. Progressively throughout the teens, the Santa Fe Style

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was embraced by residential builders and businessmen alike. The crucial moment of acceptance was the unveiling in 1913 of the renovated facade of the Palace of the Governors, New Mexico’s most historically significant secular building. Until the 1880s the one-story adobe structure had been the center of Spanish, Mexican, and American civil authority in New Mexico. In one form or another, it had witnessed some of the most dramatic events of the previous three centuries. It was here, for example, that Spanish colonists made their final stand against Pueblo tribes during the revolt of 1680, and it was here that Don Diego de Vargas brought his forces of reconquest twelve years later. Once the front of the Palace was refashioned to project Morley’s new design, brick and gingerbread orthodoxy was on its way out. Before turning to the architectural design of the new Palace facade, one must consider the political context of the building’s 1913 renovation. All local leaders, Anglo and Hispano, recognized that, along with promoting tourism, the new Palace would exhort onlookers to recall the courage of Spanish settlers and reflect on their meaning for the modern day. In one sense, that exhortation was neither new nor controversial. At least in speech and print, New Mexicans had for several decades paid homage to the manly deeds of conquistadors and devout missionaries. In celebration of the American Centennial of 1876, for example, Eugene Fiske called attention to the men who “carried the name of Spain and the Christian religion into the heart of a new continent.” 57 Tribute was also paid in published historical accounts. At the turn of the century, years before New Mexico’s professional historians took up the subject of Spanish colonization, Charles Lummis, L. Bradford Prince, and Benjamin Read penned tributes to Spanish pioneers.58 Similarly, newspaper editors such as José Escobar, Eusebio Chacón, and Enrique H. Salazar published numerous articles on the “illustrious men” of bygone days. In 1896 Octaviano Larrazolo presented a series of lectures titled Descubrimiento y conquista de América (Discovery and Conquest of America), later publishing them in the territory’s leading Spanishspeaking newspaper, La Voz del Pueblo. 59 Soon to be regarded as New Mexico’s greatest orator, Larrazolo commonly drew on themes of Spanish conquest, both to take stock of New Mexico’s “march in the path of progress and civilization” and to remind audiences of a glorious Hispano past. In a 1907 address titled “The Missionary Fathers,” he asked his mostly Anglo audience to remember that the “native people of New Mexico” founded a “truly christian civilization . . . sitting on the ruins of Paganism [sic].” He continued,

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For nearly two and a half centuries these people were practically abandoned to their own resources in a land separated from any other center of civilization by immense stretches of unsettled country, infested with roaming bands of savages. . . . [D]uring that long lapse of time they sustained an unremitting war with those barbarians in order to keep the heritage of their fathers.60

After 1900, however, the formulaic homage to Spanish fathers took on a new racial significance. As Anglos poured into the territory, Larrazolo and his colleagues spoke with heightened passion. By recalling the heroism of the first settlers, they proclaimed their right to participate as equal citizens in New Mexico’s politics. Yet the struggle to control the territory’s official history proved more difficult than the battle over elected office. Even as Larrazolo paid homage to Spanish colonists in 1907, Anglo newcomers were already installing themselves as official caretakers of New Mexico’s past. Regarding themselves as bearers of science and culture to a backward land, they had little intention of yielding to or even consulting with Hispano men of letters. The leader of the Anglo corps was Edgar Lee Hewett. Although known chiefly for his archaeological work, Hewett never settled comfortably into a single profession. Born in Illinois, he taught school in Missouri and Colorado before taking direction of the New Mexico Normal College at Las Vegas in 1898. After a political feud with Governor Otero cost him his job, he plunged into the study of southwestern archaeology. Gradually his research caught the interest of the Archaeological Institute of America, the institution that supervised field studies in Rome, Athens, Baghdad, and Jerusalem. In 1907 he was appointed head of the new School of American Archaeology (known after 1917 as the School of American Research), the first American branch of the larger Institute. Hewett then went to work on several fronts, first persuading the Institute to locate its branch in Santa Fe and then lobbying New Mexico leaders to secure a permanent site for it, preferably in the Palace of the Governors. For the latter task, Hewett turned to his emerging group of Republican allies, Paul A. F. Walter, John R. McFie, and Frank Springer. McFie, a justice of the territorial supreme court, and Springer, a wealthy lawyer, lobbied legislators to grant Hewett rights to the Palace. Walter acted as publicity man, turning out favorable editorials in the Santa Fe New Mexican. 61 In 1909, promising to “attract tourists as well scientists,” the four men convinced the territorial legislature to establish the Museum of New Mexico as a companion to the School of American Archaeology,

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to install the twin institutions in the Palace, and to place them under Hewett’s control. Hewett got virtually everything he wanted. The one limitation was architectural. The legislature, still dominated numerically by Hispanos, required that any changes to the Palace conform to “the Spanish architecture of the period of its construction” while “preserv[ing] it as a monument to the Spanish founders of the civilization of the Southwest.” 62 The mandate was curious, to say the least, in light of the Palace’s many years of neglect. Long free from periodic maintenance, the structure had deteriorated and its grounds opened to stabled animals. As much as any building, the Palace bore the stigma of Santa Fe’s “Mexican” character. In 1877 one visitor described it as “speckled and spotted as Joseph’s coat[,] . . . a disgrace to any civilized and enlightened nationality.” Occasional attempts to “Americanize” the building’s exterior—a Greek Revival–style porch was added in the 1850s, a classical balustrade in the 1880s—amounted to cosmetic changes.63 What finally got Hispano legislators interested in preserving the structure was the influx of Anglo migrants. The lawmakers understood that, apart from the political pressures of the “race issue,” Hewett was less interested in Hispano history than in Native American archaeology and ethnology. Indeed, he and his colleagues had initially considered adding a second story to the structure and refashioning it to resemble the Cortez Palace in Mexico City. That, in the eyes of Hispano legislators, was a blueprint for vandalism. It convinced them to make the old building a symbol of Spanish colonial inheritance.64 In the end, however, Hewett and his allies happily accepted the legislature’s directive, for it played to their advantage. When reconstruction of the Palace facade began late in 1912, they pulled together elements identified by Morley as integral to the Santa Fe Style. To reveal the portal “as it had been built by the Conquistadores,” they refitted the roof with projecting vigas and ornamental corbels. To give the building a massive appearance, they installed thick columns, a high parapet wall, and new corner bastions to flank the long portal. The refurbished building was certainly of a scale different from the celebrated Acoma church. In size and layout it was more akin to Santa Fe’s adobe residences, and designers appropriately chose a local composition, a familiar U-shaped house plan, for the facade’s general composition.65 Yet in the reconstructed Palace, the massive Spanish colonial simplicity Morley had first discerned found expression. In his annual report of 1913, Hewett all but drew the parallel to Acoma: “The restoration is in the strong and simple lines of the ancient buildings and the result is a

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structure almost monolithic in character.” The building’s Spanish legacy was fully articulated by Paul Walter. The new Palace, Walter wrote, simultaneously bespoke “reverence for the . . . deeds of the Spanish ancestors” and ennobled the pursuits of “art, science and education” taking place behind its walls. It “represented a monument to and for a proud people who are patiently, hopefully, triumphantly rearing a great commonwealth on soil hallowed by the blood of the martyrs and glorified by the deeds of the Conquistadores.” 66 Walter did not identify the “proud people” of whom he spoke. His conveniently vague reference, coupled with the familiar image of spilled Spanish blood, conveyed the impression that Hewett and his Palace caretakers were dedicated to honoring the dead in ways that all New Mexicans could support. Yet the obeisance to Spanish imagery did not allay all concerns. In January 1913 a rival group weighed in.67 Led by L. B. Prince and backed by seventy-two supporters, nearly half of them Hispano, the Society for the Preservation of Spanish Antiquities opposed the move to bring the ruins of Franciscan missions under control of the museum/school. Among other worries, the society feared that Hewett’s emphasis on Native American culture would distort the ruins’ Spanish colonial character. Hewett was unbowed. Sensing that the society was “creating prejudice among the Spanish-American people,” he called on Springer, McFie, and Walter to spread the word that all New Mexican interests would be equally served by the museum’s work. With his ties to the state GOP, Hewett had little troubling vanquishing the society and continuing his work. What remained unclear was how he and his allies would continue the architectural tribute to Spanish civilization.68 The answer began to take shape two years later, when New Mexico opened its first state exhibit at a national exposition, the PanamaCalifornia Exposition of 1915. Held at San Diego, the exposition was ostensibly staged to mark the opening of the Panama Canal, though like national fairs at Philadelphia, Chicago, Buffalo, and St. Louis, it overflowed with motives and meanings. In San Diego itself, boosters saw a chance to enlarge the city’s population and gain recognition as the West Coast’s preferred shipping terminus. Throughout southern California, business groups regarded the exposition as an unparalleled opportunity to present the region to tourists and potential home owners. Advertising pitches drew generously on the exposition’s motto, American progress, the same theme long expressed in national fairs but, increasingly in recent years, colored by notions of racial advancement.

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As was true at the Columbian Exposition of 1893, and even more so at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition of 1904, organizers of the San Diego fair construed progress as a kind of human evolution, the onward march of white America in a global context.69 The man charged with bringing the evolution motif to life was none other than Edgar Hewett. Appointed director of exhibits, Hewett promptly settled on three exhibition categories: “The Physical Evolution of Man,” “The Evolution of Culture,” and “The Native Races of America.” Inspired by the pseudoscience of racial difference, he and assistants from the Smithsonian Institution collected skulls and skeletal remains to depict the human past and to suggest future paths of advancement. Like other adherents of the eugenics project known as “race betterment,” Hewett believed that science should take an active role in perfecting the racial character of modern society. Just as the scientist traced the history of human development, he must also deploy “well-known biological laws for breeding the human species.” 70 Expressive in their own right, Hewett’s sober anthropological exhibits dovetailed nicely with the exposition’s place of amusement, its socalled Isthmus. Following the model of earlier fairs, most notably the 1893 Columbian Exposition, the Isthmus was envisioned as both entertaining and edifying. Visitors thus beheld a miniature Chinatown with an underground opium den and a staging of southern African American life, complete with corn bread and banjo dancing. Among the more elaborate and compelling exhibits was the “Painted Desert,” a reproduction on ten acres of Taos and Zuni Pueblos, Navajo hogans, tipis, a trading post, and nearly three hundred members of southwestern tribes. Like train passengers who stayed at Albuquerque’s Alvarado Hotel, visitors to the “Painted Desert” were afforded both the thrill of mixing with Indians and enlightening observations of blanket and pottery making. The dual offerings reflected the separate motives of the exhibit’s two sponsors. Created jointly by the Santa Fe Railway and the Museum of New Mexico, the outdoor museum promoted southwestern tourism while setting the exposition’s theme of Anglo-Saxon ascendancy in bold relief.71 To frame the racial contrast most vividly, exposition organizers called on the rhetorical and visual imagery of California’s Spanish revival. By 1915 southern California was one of the nation’s more vibrant and chaotic places. Among other happenings, daily life was marked by frenetic real estate deals, angry labor protests, and the travails of Mexican immigrants and war refugees. Spanish imagery helped to lift the expo-

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sition above the fray. Intent on creating a genteel and enchanting stage setting, organizers presented the exposition in an enclosed Spanishthemed city built on a mesa about a mile from downtown San Diego. The link with California’s first Spanish settlers was exploited most effectively by John Steven McGroarty, an effusive writer who became the chief promoter of bygone Spanish days as Lummis slowed down in the 1920s. McGroarty recalled in one brochure that although Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo reached present San Diego in 1542, California actually “began” in 1769 when Don Gaspar de Portolá and Father Junípero Serra set foot on solid earth, “tell[ing] the world that a white man’s face might once more be seen in the Port of San Diego.” Because they “suffered and toiled and died to win a heathen land to God and civilization,” Serra and his fellow Franciscans “stand out now in bold and strong relief even against the panoply of modern progress.” The exposition itself did not trumpet the ideal of white civilization so directly; it preferred to convey its message through dazzling architecture and didactic exhibits. Nonetheless, McGroarty’s words resonated with the fair’s diverse elements: its ideal of American progress, the theme of racial and cultural evolution, and the contrast between the nonwhite peoples of the Isthmus and the well-dressed visitors who strolled among the exposition buildings.72 The design of those buildings was the fair’s most impressive feature. Crossing an arched bridge and passing through the fair’s main gate, visitors beheld a spectacle of domes and towers in “a Spanish city of the seventeenth century.” Journalists repeatedly invoked Spanish castles and the Alhambra to describe the effect; one observer found it more Spanish than Spain itself. In keeping with the intent of the fair’s chief architect, Bertram Goodhue, the buildings were not of a single design. In the early stages of planning, organizers had considered constructing the imaginary city in the tasteful though modest Mission Revival, the purest exemplar of which was the one-story Los Angeles residence of 1900. They quickly decided, however, that Mission Revival was far too austere to sate their appetite for opulence and fancy. Goodhue responded with compositions that borrowed liberally from Mexico, Spain, and Italy, all of which were unified under the theme of Spanish Renaissance. Accented by Spanish singers and even costumed security guards, the atmosphere was one dissociated from a set place or time. A tribute to white builders of “civilization,” the city celebrated human progress without itself being subject to the laws of time and change.73 New Mexicans readily took up the general Spanish theme, but they

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refused to submerge their own contribution in the collective spirit of whimsy. Always keen on standing apart from southern California, state officials drew attention to what they saw as New Mexico’s more dramatic Spanish colonial past, a past that demanded somber reverence. Amid the exposition’s spirit of festivity, they erected a state building that set forth the theme of struggle. Headed by museum ally Ralph Emerson Twitchell, they modeled their building on the familiar mission church at Acoma and named as chief architect I. H. Rapp, the designer of the Acoma-like warehouse that first caught the eye of Sylvanus Morley. Unveiled in 1915, the New Mexico Building articulated the general design of the new Santa Fe Style. More important, it recalled the martyrdom of fallen Franciscans and the courageous perseverance of all those who fought to protect “the fruits of civilization.” 74 The building was a smashing success. It attracted a horde of visitors and won top honors in the exposition’s competition. Enthusiastic onlookers marveled at its smooth exterior and whitewashed interior galleries. But they did not see much of New Mexico’s present-day Hispano character. The building’s interior was given over to exhibits of mineral, agricultural, and forestry resources, along with Indian blankets and pottery, all of which were aimed at both edifying visitors and marketing the state.75 The most popular attractions were Indian ceremonial dances. Whether portrayed in motion pictures or presented in the flesh, they caused spectators to “go wild.” Supervisors quickly took to using Indian shows to drum up publicity. In a most inventive stunt, the building’s local director reported the theft of a reel of film depicting the San Geronimo festival, a feast at Taos Pueblo. Left behind, the director said, was a message, “in crude Indian handwriting: ‘bad medisin. no can have indian race pitchers. no like to steel but you steel pitchers from indians. now gottem back. indians all sick, burn pitchers indians get well.’” The fabricated note was released to newspapers just in time to make the front page of California’s Sunday morning editions. After Paul Walter supposedly discovered a reserve reel of the film in Santa Fe and expressed it to San Diego, attendance at the New Mexico Building soared.76 The ruse was only one example of the broader tendency to turn nonwhite people into objects of study and amusement. In recounting the schemes of racial classification at the exposition, scholars have shown how Indians, Africans, and Asians were all assigned to a common racial realm, a figurative place, whether on the Isthmus or in the “Painted Desert,” that was occupied by the colonized “Other.” The New Mexico exhibit, however, broke with that practice, for it put very different

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values on the state’s Indians and paisanos. Indispensable to the Southwest’s emerging tourist industry, and useful for simply attracting a crowd, Indians were brought to California because they thrilled white spectators without diminishing New Mexico’s portrayal of itself as an up-to-date commonwealth. With hostilities in the past, such attractions as the “Painted Desert” only showed how Indian people lived in small villages or on enclosed reservations. Although some officials grumbled that Indian displays did nothing to dispel the state’s reputation as “a land of sand, cactus and Indians,” the effect was quite the opposite. By revealing how social scientists had turned Indian dress, dwellings, crafts, and people into objects of study, the exhibits demonstrated that Native Americans were under Anglo control. Los paisanos, by contrast, were not a people Anglo organizers wished to showcase. For all the excitement over New Mexico’s Spanish colonial building, ordinary Spanish-speaking people were not invited to San Diego, and exhibits of Hispano history and culture never even made the drawing board. When Lt. Gov. Ezéquiel C. de Baca welcomed the king of Spain to the New Mexico Building, he was applauded by Twitchell, its director, for bringing high honor on the state. Otherwise, the most conspicuous nativo was Chief Attendant Romulo Martínez, whose job was to bow to visitors at the front door and say, “New Mexico bids you welcome.” 77

The Cathedral in the Desert Signs of Hispano culture were absent from San Diego because they reminded Anglo New Mexicans of the very challenge they sought to overcome. Just as Charles Lummis had honored manly Franciscan fathers in California, so, too, Walter, Morley, and Twitchell invoked their memory in New Mexico. In each case mission ruins exhorted presentday Anglos to continue the friars’ work by laying the foundations of a twentieth-century civilization. Yet for Morley and particularly for Walter, “civilization” bore a special meaning. Though in part a measure of what Anglos had achieved, it remained an aspiration, an unfulfilled hope. Along with living in an economically underdeveloped state, Walter and his boss, Edgar Hewett, also struggled against New Mexico’s reputation for widespread ignorance, political corruption, and violence. Although the notorious Santa Fe Ring was a relic of territorial days, tales of political payoffs and electoral chicanery abounded. Nor could

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Anglo newcomers easily forget the shootouts in Lincoln County, the fence cutting in Rio Arriba and San Miguel, or an outbreak of political assassinations in the 1890s.78 Like their counterparts across the West, Walter and Hewett at first tried to dismiss past and present liabilities as the growing pains of a frontier state. Yet los paisanos always got in the way. Even after the turn of the century, articles in local and national publications continued to assail the place “where the native people are in the majority.” Owing to the renewed campaign for statehood, critics zeroed in on Hispanos’ apparent civic failings. Far worse than a primitive and listless people lining up at the saloon, “perfectly oblivious of time, responsibility or life,” was their influence over government. In grousing that Hispanos frequently held office and had no liking for “Americans,” critics expressed shock at the widespread inability to speak English. They could barely believe, for example, that jury trials and legislative debates were conducted in two languages and translated back and forth. More than just a stumbling block in official proceedings, the lack of a common language aroused a more general racial unease about the prospect of outnumbered “white people” sharing the governance of a new state with a “Mexican” population.79 To counterbalance New Mexico’s unfortunate reputation, Walter articulated a mixed vision of civilization. In keeping with Progressive-era controls of the early 1900s, he advocated a program of social purification. Only by cracking down on the “stain of licentiousness, drunkenness, and graft,” he wrote, could New Mexico gain respect as a modern commonwealth. At the same time, to improve New Mexico’s dismal state of economic development, he called for continuing the Republican Party’s blockade on corporate and political reform. After the turn of the century, amid the growing clamor for progressive change throughout the West, Walter clung to the belief that unfettered capital investment and traditional party rule were essential for prosperity. Finally, though with considerably more subtlety, Walter and the organizers of the New Mexico exhibit aimed to replace the new state’s “Mexican” reputation with the legend of noble Spanish colonizers. Their building at San Diego invited onlookers to take the measure of Hispano society through a “fitting monument to the devotion and martyrdom of the Franciscans and the valor of the Spanish Conquistadores.” 80 Consternation over the “Mexican problem” reached a particularly high level in the teens. Along with the political turbulence caused by the “race issue,” Mexico itself posed an unprecedented threat. When the

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nation plunged into civil war in 1911, New Mexicans accustomed to the Díaz regime suddenly confronted the fear of revolutionary and racial contagion. Both Anglos and prominent Hispanos sounded the alarm. Attacking the Wilson administration for inaction, U.S. senator Albert B. Fall proposed armed intervention to quell the disturbances. Anglos living along the border, he reminded his colleagues, feared being overrun by a “thieving combination of pelados . . . who have robbed and murdered . . . at their pleasure.” Elite Hispanos reacted with only slightly more caution. Although former Las Vegas resident Felix Martínez believed that Mexico presented no immediate threat, attorney E. V. Chávez told Fall that intervention was the only way to “put a stop to such savagery.” Others expressed a readiness to fight. The wellknown friends of Charles Lummis, Amado and Ireneo Chaves, informed Gov. William McDonald of their availability. “The Mexican situation looks now serious and we may have trouble with that country,” Amado wrote. “If trouble comes—myself and my brother offer you our services. We will be ready to march to the front on a moment’s notice.” 81 The Chaves brothers were only two of the many Hispanos who hoped to insulate Spanish-speaking society of the upper Rio Grande from disturbances south of the border. They surely knew that in the rising clamor, neither Americans generally nor a good many Anglo New Mexicans readily made the distinction. The damage to New Mexico was summarized by Frank N. Page, a salty Anglo rancher who reminded Fall that “a great many of the citizens in the densely populated part of our Country do not know the difference between our Native people and the ‘Pelados’ of Mexico. You can see how it hurts us. Of course we know that one New Mexico Native is worth Three of the citizens, on average, Natives of Mexico [sic].” To many American observers, Edgar Lee Hewett among them, the Mexican “pelado” presented a menace to America’s racial character. Thus Hewett remarked at the 1915 National Conference on Race Betterment that Mexicans “imperil in some measure the health of the race in its onward march.” 82 To New Mexicans’ dismay, events after the Panama-California Exposition only conspired to link the upper Rio Grande with the Mexican peril. On March 9, 1916, Gen. Pancho Villa raided the border town of Columbus. Inspiring anger throughout the United States, the raid particularly outraged local Anglos. In Santa Fe the New Mexican called for the raiders to be shot down “with no more consideration than that given a Gila monster or a rattlesnake.” Meanwhile, frenzied Anglos at the border took little care to distinguish the Villistas from Spanish-

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speaking Americans. On May 1 Fall reported that in the southern counties numerous residents of the state had been killed in retaliation.83 Antagonisms only intensified when the United States declared war on Germany in April 1917. Along with reports that Mexicans were massing along the border, rumors circulated that shiploads of Germans were arriving daily at Veracruz. Southern counties sent Gov. Washington Lindsey a steady stream of requests for troops and guns. The speaker of the New Mexico House of Representatives, W. H. H. Llewelyn, noting the presence of nearly two thousand “Old Mexico Mexicans” in Doña Ana County, asked that Gatling guns “secretly be placed where we could sweep the streets.” 84 As much as the border conflict stained the reputation of Hispanos, it also offered Anglo politicians the opportunity to score political points. Given the political tensions of the “race issue,” Anglos anxious to shore up Hispano support made certain to articulate the difference between “Spanish-Americans” and the “Mexican.” The best chance came just before the gubernatorial contest between Felix Garcia and Octaviano Larrazolo. In August 1918 a letter bearing the pseudonym Henry Wray in the North American Review claimed that New Mexico’s Hispano population, having “remained Mexican in every sense of the word[,] . . . await[ed] its hour to strike.” Leaders of both parties wasted no time in drafting their replies. Albert Fall affirmed that “New Mexico’s population of Spanish descent” was unflaggingly loyal to the United States. On the floor of Congress, New Mexico Rep. W. B. Walton took special exception to the implication that “the Spanish-American population of New Mexico is one in sympathy and interest with the peon of Mexico.” New Mexico’s Hispano people, he wrote, are “descendants of the Conquistadors, who wrested the Southwest from the savage tribes of Indians. The blood of nobility flows in their veins.” 85 Amid the claims and counterclaims, New Mexicans dedicated the Museum of Fine Arts. Early in 1915 Republicans John McFie and Frank Springer had prevailed on the New Mexico legislature to support the building’s construction, and Springer himself made a handsome contribution. All parties had rallied in support of a design that would outshine that of the New Mexico Building at San Diego. With Acoma’s Mission San Estevan remaining the principal model, the design was elaborated with elements drawn from Franciscan churches at San Felipe, Laguna, and other pueblos. Interior spaces, uncluttered by the many exhibits of the New Mexico Building, presented the Spanish colonial motif as powerfully as the structure’s exterior. Furniture in the museum

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galleries, for example, replicated hand-carved pieces of a well-appointed eighteenth-century home. Most dramatic was the building’s St. Francis Auditorium. Configured to resemble the nave of a church, its walls were adorned with murals depicting the life of Saint Francis. Casting him as the bearer of European art and letters, the murals linked the civilizing spirit of Spanish colonizers and the pursuit of cultivation in the modern day. The association was echoed in the art museum. By featuring the paintings of local artists on “mission walls,” the museum’s galleries sheltered the pursuit of creative excellence with the sturdy legacy of the padres. The metaphorical meanings were not lost on Hewett’s associates. More than “a mere curio collection,” the likes of which had proliferated in Santa Fe since the 1880s, the museum struck them as something larger than a lure for well-heeled tourists. As it contributed to the “atmosphere of refinement [and] love of the beautiful,” it promised to “spread far and wide” a refashioned image of New Mexico.86 Not all onlookers joined the celebration of European tradition. Conspicuously absent was Carlos Vierra, a Portuguese American artist on Hewett’s staff who assisted in painting the Saint Francis murals. Although he worked energetically to popularize the Santa Fe Style, he departed from Sylvanus Morley’s tribute to Spanish influence. “In considering the mission structures,” he wrote, “too much has been made of the native design’s relation to Spanish architecture.” Vierra placed his emphasis on the Pueblos. Spanish missionaries, he asserted, only adapted Indian forms of wood and adobe to ecclesiastical uses. With stone, lime, and tile unavailable, the interlopers relied on the genius of Indian builders, the legacy of which lived on in the new museum. Far from stolid and monotonous, as Morley had claimed, Indian dwellings were the foundation of a vibrant regional style.87 In highlighting Indian origins, Vierra spoke for a number of local and national observers. His perspective was especially appealing to the communities of artists and writers, now gathering at Santa Fe and Taos, who found in the Pueblos a spirit of primitive authenticity. Just as the aesthetes often viewed the Pueblos as a people of the soil, Vierra drew a subtle parallel between the contributions of Indian builders and the weathering of sun, wind, and rain. Both Indian hands and natural erosion, he suggested, were the expressions of a benevolent upper Rio Grande environment. Vierra’s position also fit the desire to identify a pure American artistic tradition. Noting that America lacked a national architecture, he proposed that the Pueblo legacy was “prehistoric American in character and construction,” a claim that was readily taken up by journalists who visited the new museum. “At last we may boast of an American art museum that

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is completely American,” one reviewer wrote. “American in its origin and American in its aims.” 88 Hewett and his allies had good reason to embrace Vierra’s interpretation. The Museum of New Mexico was devoted principally to the study of Native American archaeology and culture. Paintings exhibited at the art museum were dominated by Indian motifs. Santa Fe’s residents enjoyed a steady diet of lectures on Pueblo pottery and weaving. And the success of the “Painted Desert” at San Diego surely convinced holdouts that Indian life was the chief interest of the tourist. Under all these circumstances, building an art museum to resemble a terraced Pueblo lodge, or at least playing up the Indian character of the mission design, could hardly seem out of the question. But that is exactly what it was. Hispano legislators had not allowed designers to turn the Palace of the Governors into a monument to the conquered “savages,” and they were not about to back down on the style of the new art museum. In debates of 1915, for example, State Rep. Malaquias Martínez, the grandson of the famous nineteenth-century Taos priest, Antonio José Martínez, called the building “a memorial to inspire future generations and to remember the deeds of the conquistadores and their descendants.” A truly Native American building, or even one interpreted as such, would have undoubtedly dishonored, in the words of Secretary of State Antonio Lucero, “the work that [our] ancestors and the Catholic pioneers did for civilization.” 89 “Civilization” lay at the heart the matter. No matter how well it suited the interests of tourists, artists, and scientists, an Indian legacy was alien to the shared ideal of white and manly civility. For elite Hispanos, as for Hewett and his allies, the Palace of the Governors and the Museum of Fine Arts signified that the exhortation of the Franciscan fathers to civilize a frontier had not been forgotten. At the museum’s dedication, on November 23, 1917, Hewett, Springer, and Lucero each spoke in their honor. Hewett opened by recalling the padres’ “superhuman devotion.” Springer, the man most directly responsible for the museum’s creation, followed with an hourlong keynote address. He told his audience that before British colonists had set foot at Plymouth, the fathers had “endured privation, suffering, torture and martyrdom, with a fortitude and religious enthusiasm which have never been surpassed.” Springer then reflected on how the Franciscan legacy would inspire civilized pursuits of the modern day. In the chapel where the builders were wont to preach, Science will raise its torch; where once they dwelt, Art will reign; and where they taught their simple lessons, modern Education will approach the problems of

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our time. The voice of the Friar will not be heard; but his influence and example will endure. And if we who succeed them shall bring to the new tasks even a small part of the energy, the perseverance, and the singlehearted devotion which were exhibited by those old Franciscans, then indeed may we hope to leave memorials of our time that will outlast even these walls.90

Lucero, somewhat anticlimactically, ended the dedication with a scholarly oration on Franciscan history. Far more notable than his speech, and ultimately more revealing about the politics of commemoration, was a proposal he had made previously regarding the arrangement of the museum’s exhibits. On September 7, in a letter to the New Mexican, the respected Hispano Democrat suggested that a gallery be set aside for displaying photographs of the state’s most famous Spanishspeaking figures. The idea was surely inspired by Lucero’s not altogether happy years of experience in public life. He had worked side by side with Ezéquiel C. de Baca and Felix Martínez at La Voz del Pueblo since before the turn of the century and had served as secretary of state from 1912 to 1919. C. de Baca, Martínez, and Lucero were organizers of the rally at which Eusebio Chacón spoke in 1902, and the trio had long championed the rights of el pueblo hispanoamericano against the overwhelming dominance of Anglo Republicans. In 1913, to oppose the move by Hewett and company to take control of New Mexico’s mission ruins, he joined L. B. Prince’s Society for the Preservation of Spanish Antiquities. Now, after three decades of fighting to bring Hispanos recognition and respect, he proposed what he considered a modest step toward that unfulfilled goal. Noting the thousands of dollars spent each year on advertising Native American attractions, he argued that a much smaller amount could assist Anglo newcomers in learning about what the “conquistadores and their descendants” accomplished for “civilization.” Properly shown, photographs of the Lunas, Pereas, Chaveses, Oteros, Armijos, and Martínezes would reveal to the newcomers a significant chapter of New Mexico’s history and “create a better feeling between the two races.” Perhaps not surprisingly, Lucero’s proposal went nowhere. It was shot down by the Santa Fe New Mexican in an editorial published alongside his letter. The newspaper argued that a room devoted exclusively to Hispanos only reinforced racial divisions and aggravated the “race issue.” All New Mexicans value memories of their state’s Spanish colonial past, the newspaper said, but the focus of the present day must be the “obliteration of racial lines.” Rather than salute Hispano achievements, New Mexicans should focus on a common iden-

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tity. “The only thing to do with a bone of contention is to bury it,” the newspaper wrote. “There is just one way to absolutely amalgamate and consolidate the races in this state; and that is: ‘Forget it!’” 91 The rejection was indicative of the racial inequality lurking behind perorations on a Spanish colonial civilization. Like other prominent Hispanos, Lucero felt the sting of racial prejudice keenly enough. Isolated from decisions to develop a new architecture, he nonetheless saw an opportunity to raise the esteem of Hispanos. If actual control of the buildings was firmly in the hands of Anglo newcomers, the mission architecture, he believed, could at least throw favorable light on the figurative descendants of those men who brought civilization to a savage land. That estimation may not have been far off the mark. At the same time political events were turning “Mexicans” into “Spanish-Americans,” the visual allegory of mission architecture may indeed have prompted Anglos to think twice about their Spanish-speaking neighbors. Yet as was true of the “Spanish” rhetoric of party politics, architectural symbolism was easily co-opted and exploited by the newcomers. Hewett and his allies made that quite clear. Rather than confer respect on any class of living Hispanos, their aim was simply to clothe “Mexican” New Mexico in the raiment of Spanish colonial civility, all the while burnishing their own work in civilizing the Southwest anew. They took it for granted that living Hispanos, rich or poor, had little if any part to play in reviving a Spanish past. Much to Hewett’s dismay, that assumption would soon be challenged.

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chapter 4

Discovering “Spanish Culture” at the Santa Fe Fiesta, 1919 –1936 The 220th annual Fiesta of Santa Fe . . . is again notable for the completeness with which it has become a spontaneous and entirely genuine New Mexico Spanish celebration, with the thousands of Spanish speaking population, descendants of Spanish colonizers of New Spain, in the center of the stage. Santa Fe New Mexican, September 6, 1932

Less than three years after the opening of the Museum of Fine Arts, Santa Feans once again came together to commemorate Franciscan sacrifice. In the early fall of 1920 they assembled before the Palace of the Governors to hear elder statesman L. B. Prince extol the devotion of those who died while ministering to the “hostile tribes of an alien race.” Following the address, the assembly moved slowly through the city and into the hills north of town. The goal was the newly built Cross of the Martyrs, a massive concrete cruciform raised in memory of the twenty-one missionaries killed during the Pueblo Revolt of 1680. Gathering around the new monument, they listened to still more somber speeches about Franciscan martyrdom. Yet once the last word was spoken, the doleful mood quickly brightened. Organizers of the solemn ceremony had deliberately scheduled it during Santa Fe’s newly revived Fiesta, the official commemoration of the return of Spanish authority to New Mexico in 1693. Santa Fe’s seven thousand Hispano and Anglo residents were thus invited to reflect on the moment of Spanish defeat and sacrifice before returning to the celebration of a glorious Spanish reconquest.1 128

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As an observance of the reconquest, the Santa Fe Fiesta was born of both Hispano-Catholic memory and Anglo contrivance. For much of Santa Fe’s history, rich and poor Hispanos have recalled the Spanish return in an elaborate religious ceremony that unfolds on city streets. In 1919, after sporadic attempts in previous years, a more secular, Anglodirected commemoration was inaugurated. Known as La Fiesta de Santa Fe, the new festival was organized by Edgar Hewett and the Museum of New Mexico as a pageant of southwestern history and culture, a dynamic exhibition of parades, ceremonial dances, costumes, and artifacts that mediated between scholarly and popular conceptions of the region. Drawing on the state’s rich history, Hewett created a festival in three parts, with Anglos, Hispanos, and Indians each receiving separate tribute. Although the Fiesta’s pageantry and its behind-the-scenes leadership have since undergone periodic changes, the event is still promoted, in the spirit of the original “tricultural” framework, as a festival in which northern New Mexico’s “three cultures” can jointly participate.2 Amid the cheerful rhetoric, the historical significance of the event has sometimes gotten lost, and scholars have reached different conclusions about what the Fiesta was and is all about. While some see the festival as a celebration of Spanish conquest, others interpret it as an exposition of Indian art and ceremony. And while most observers zero in on Hewett’s “invention” of the modern Fiesta in 1919, a few find continuity with the nineteenth century. Thus the festival, if not quite all things to all people, at least offers evidence to support competing interpretations.3 None of them, it seems to me, adequately explains what happened during the 1920s, the Fiesta’s formative decade. Early in the decade, Spanish colonial pageantry served principally as a figurative stage. Under Hewett’s guidance, commemoration of the reconquest was merely a showcase for the Fiesta’s main attraction, the performances of Pueblo Indians. Yet unlike architectural design, the Fiesta resisted the direction of a single authority. After 1926 Hewett lost control to an alliance of Santa Fe’s artists and writers who, in spite of their bohemian manner, gained the backing of prominent political and business interests, Hispano and Anglo. The upstarts insisted that the Fiesta center on northern New Mexico’s “Spanish culture,” the songs, dances, food, and crafts of los paisanos. Embodying modernist assumptions about racial and cultural difference, the new festival portrayed paisanos as a precious folk culture, an entity, animated by warm Spanish colonial tradition, that might well enrich the whole town. The ideal Spanish archetype changed accordingly. Although the festival still paid homage to colonial

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heroes, the newly celebrated “Spanish culture” was symbolized less by men of the sword and cross than by the ordinary Hispano villager, a figure now embodied by women as well as men. Indeed, as the keeper of the hearth, the humble Hispana from Santa Fe’s outlying towns presented los paisanos as a wholesome and accommodating gente whose agrarian lives were shaped by nourishing folkways learned in the church and the home.4 The vision of a domesticated Hispano folk culture had a powerful effect on Santa Fe’s Anglos. As they welcomed los paisanos with open arms, they also embraced the once-pejorative characterization of Santa Fe as an Hispano town. In the years since the 1920s, they have scarcely changed their minds. As one anthropologist recently noted, the Fiesta’s Hispano-Catholic symbolism signifies Anglo acknowledgment that Santa Fe is, at heart, a “Hispanic city.” 5 What remains in question is the deeper meaning of that acknowledgment. By the late twenties the Fiesta already seemed to please both Anglos and Hispanos. Although it was predominantly organized and run by Anglos, los paisanos were happy to sell their goods on the streets of Santa Fe and to perform folk songs and dances on the festival’s center stage. More prominent Hispanos likewise took the opportunity to appear as leaders of a newly celebrated “Spanish culture” and to act as mediators between Spanish-speaking villagers and Anglo residents. It is noteworthy, however, that the new Fiesta took shape during a decade in which Santa Fe’s Anglo population was doubling. Intent on attracting tourists, Anglo businesspeople readily paid tribute to a “Spanish culture” without halting their acquisition of property or their expansion into local markets. Hispanos faced very different circumstances. As los paisanos struggled to feed their families, more prominent nativos, remembering the influence wielded by their grandfathers, recognized that their best days were likely behind them. With their power slipping, they seized the chance to assert their descent from Spanish colonists. What observers of the Fiesta have failed to recognize is that the prestige Hispanos gained on the stage or in the street disguised, and sometimes even reinforced, their actual losses.

The Return of Don Diego de Vargas Since its beginning La Fiesta de Santa Fe has commemorated a fanciful event. According to the now-popular account, in 1692 Spanish soldiers drove Indians from Santa Fe, thereby effecting a “peaceful” or “blood-

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less” reconquest. The legend is not baseless, for Spanish soldiers did indeed confront Pueblo tribes at Santa Fe in 1692. But the actual conquest concluded a year later, and it was far bloodier than legend has conceded. The campaign began twelve years after the Pueblo Revolt of 1680, when Capt. Don Diego de Vargas led his troops up the Rio Grande to recapture the city. After he arrived at Santa Fe’s outskirts in September 1692, Pueblo occupants granted him free passage. But the following year, when he returned to Santa Fe with the manpower and provisions to reoccupy northern New Mexico, the Pueblos refused to step aside. Growing impatient in December’s bitter cold, Vargas stormed the town and overwhelmed the warriors. He then executed seventy male prisoners and enslaved roughly four hundred women and children.6 In 1712 citizens of Santa Fe organized a commemoration of the reconquest. Undoubtedly mindful of the bloody battle of 1693, they identified the entrada (entry) of 1692 as the praiseworthy event, and, through the agency of the royal governor, José Chacón Medina Salazar y Villaseñor, Marqués de la Peñuela, they decreed its public remembrance with a “Fiesta” of vespers, a mass, a sermon, and a procession around the plaza. The decree also entreated citizens to celebrate the victory each year, relying on a dedicated portion of the city’s annual revenues. Whether or not city residents complied after 1712, the reconquest itself was not forgotten.7 Its public memory was preserved chiefly through the devotion to a twenty-eight-inch statue of the Virgin Mother, Nuestra Señora del Rosario, La Conquistadora. Brought to Santa Fe early in the seventeenth century, the statue was removed to safety during the Pueblo Revolt of 1680. In 1693 she was returned to Santa Fe with Vargas as an inspiration to victory. Aside from a brief hiatus in the mid-1700s, La Conquistadora has been worshiped by Santa Fe’s Catholic residents ever since. In 1806 a chapel was constructed northwest of town, and residents began to carry the statue to it in annual processions from her residence at Santa Fe’s main church. Although it is not clear that the processions follow directly from the 1712 decree, they demonstrate at the very least that Spanish-speaking residents have long observed 1692 as the year Catholicism was restored in northern New Mexico.8 The veneration of La Conquistadora, though unique to Santa Fe, takes its place in a constellation of Catholic ceremonies on the upper Rio Grande. As in countries throughout the Americas, each Spanishspeaking village of northern New Mexico honored its own patron saint in an annual fiesta. Donning their finest clothes, villagers typically at-

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tended vespers and mass before processing slowly through streets and fields behind a carved or painted santo. In some cases they held all-night vigils, saying prayers and singing hymns in the darkness of a church or cornfield. The solemn observance was ordinarily followed by a carnival of sorts, with games, food, and dancing.9 Alongside the saints’ days, the most involved devotions took place during the Christmas season and the Lenten period, the latter culminating in fervent expressions of faith during Holy Week. Every Catholic ceremony had both religious and civic meaning. As the rituals expressed a Christian faith, and perhaps a hope for abundant harvests, they also affirmed the bonds of community. The work behind the scenes of each ceremony, such as preparing a feast and cleaning a church, required the help of all villagers, as did the observances themselves. One participant, Andrés Mora, recalled that in the 1930s, before a church was built in the village of Escabosa, the patron saint San Isidro was kept at the home of the mayordomo, the community leader. On May 14 San Isidro was borne from house to house and then to the fields. All residents prayed and sang as they walked in procession, and all took a turn carrying the carved statue. The festive side of the occasion also strengthened community ties. The sharing of food and song renewed bonds of a village’s families, encouraging them to lend a hand at harvest or planting time. The annual feasts, games, and bailes (dances) gave villagers a chance to meet people from other towns. Eddie Chávez, a resident of Los Candelarias, a village just upstream from Albuquerque, remembered that the music and dancing at the fiesta of San Antonio brought visitors from Alameda, Griegos, and Ranchitos, just as those towns, each observing their own fiestas, welcomed residents of Los Candelarias.10 In Santa Fe the bonds of Hispano residents were similarly strengthened by the observance of Corpus Christi and the veneration of La Conquistadora. Unlike the smaller and more culturally homogeneous village fiestas, the grand processions in Santa Fe reflected the capital city’s internal divisions of race and religion. As the Anglo population of Santa Fe grew after the Civil War, public expressions of Catholic faith helped to define the boundaries of nativo society. They also affirmed that the much larger Hispano population, regardless of diminishing wealth and political power, dictated the rhythms of civic life. With Anglo merchants and government officials steadily acquiring private property, Catholic processions declared that the silent Hispano participants, clad in brilliant white dress, still controlled Santa Fe’s public space. In the words of one scholar, the observances took “possession of what al-

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ready ‘really belongs to us.’” 11 They were not, however, invulnerable to intrusion or exploitation. With the first stirring of tourism in Santa Fe, Anglos identified the processions as exotic tourist attractions, a move that was not welcomed by Hispano participants. When Anglos tried to photograph the ceremonies, the faithful hid their faces. In at least one case they destroyed a film of the Corpus Christi procession intended for exhibition at the Panama-California Exposition.12 Ultimately, Hispanos’ control of the processions prevented Anglos from fully explointing them. Far more marketable as a tourist attraction was the reenactment of Don Diego de Vargas’s entrance into Santa Fe. Unlike the Catholic observances, the Vargas entrada was portable; it could be staged at any place and time, if necessary with costumed Anglos. More spirited and heroic than solemn and devotional, the entrada also appealed to spectators, often Anglo migrants, accustomed to watching a dramatic military parade. That is not to suggest that Hispanos cared nothing of Vargas’s memory. In 1893, the two hundredth anniversary of the reconquest, superintendent of public instruction Amado Chaves distributed extracts of Vargas’s diary to prominent educators across the United States. Like other Spanish-speaking New Mexicans, Chaves sought a place for the conquistadores in the study of American colonial history. Nevertheless, Hispanos typically viewed the exploits in the context of a mission to reestablish Catholicism, and they henceforth observed the reconquest principally through the figure of La Conquistadora. Anglos, by contrast, looked on Vargas as military commander and bearer of colonial civilization. Even Protestants could admire his legacy.13 A Vargas suitable for tourism appeared shortly after the turn of the century. In 1911 and 1912 Santa Fe presented the De Vargas Pageant, an event with none of the Tertio-Millennial’s frantic extravagance. Instead of wandering fairgoers and various exhibits, the event featured a parade of brightly costumed figures marching regally on city streets between rows of orderly spectators. In place of the 1883 spectacle of native warriors climbing atop buildings, Indians were presented chiefly as dignified men on horseback, outfitted with weapons, blankets, drums, and tribal insignia. The pageant’s high point came when Vargas arrived at the Palace of the Governors, dismounted his steed before a large wooden cross, and proclaimed that Spanish authority had returned.14 Hailing the event as a superb tourist lure, the Santa Fe New Mexican speculated that with a bit more planning, the pageant would draw unlimited attention to the history of Santa Fe, “attract[ing] crowds from

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far and near.” In fact, the newspaper went on, the pageant might soon compare favorably with southern California’s San Gabriel Mission Play, John Steven McGroarty’s drama of Franciscan heroism. Soon to eclipse Lummis as the West Coast’s premier Spanish colonial litterateur, McGroarty compared his performance to the world-renowned Passion Play at Oberammergau. With its smashing debut in April 1912, the San Gabriel play had set a new standard for Spanish pageantry in the Southwest, leaving Santa Fe and the De Vargas show in the familiar role of also-ran. The New Mexican responded in customary fashion, arguing that while the pageant had yet to gain the publicity accorded San Gabriel, it tapped a much deeper and more colorful vein of history. The only thing lacking was a plot, a narrative to make the brilliant imagery of Vargas and the Pueblos into a true theatrical show. Once it was had, Santa Fe would revel in a “fame that would equal that of Ober Ammergau.” 15 Tourism alone, however, does not account for the manner in which Vargas appeared in Santa Fe in 1911 and 1912. The decision of civic leaders to stage a pageant, rather than another Tertio-Millennial–type fair, was strikingly consistent with a theatrical phenomenon taking place throughout the United States just after the turn of century. Roughly between 1905 and 1917, cities across the nation presented a new kind of historical drama. Rather than highlight a single, morally exemplary event, such as national sacrifice during the American Revolution, the new pageantry typically presented a town’s history as a continuous narrative of progress, from a Native American past to a twentieth-century present. And rather than extol only Anglo-Saxon achievements, it often incorporated contributions of multiple groups. At a time when American cities were fractured into competing ethnoracial blocs, the prewar pageants portrayed a unified civic culture. What audiences did not see was the behind-the-scenes leadership of an Anglo-American elite, whose interests were inevitably served by whatever civic unity was achieved.16 The De Vargas Pageant fit the national pattern in both form and thematic content. It did so in the first place by locating the Vargas entrada in a continuum of regional and national history. Following Vargas’s proclamation at the Palace of the Governors, an estimated eight thousand spectators were regaled with symbols of the Mexican and American periods: the Mexican national anthem, the Declaration of Independence, the Star-Spangled Banner, a parade of veterans and Boy Scouts and, capping the show, a cavalcade of automobiles.17 The progressive format, along with its “American” finale, amplified the image of

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Santa Fe favored by the pageant’s organizers—that of a city suffused by a rich and colorful history yet fully in step with the new Anglo era. Held on the Fourth of July, just before and after the moment of statehood, the pageant let observers know that Santa Fe was a unique but dignified capital city, a place where an exotic past did not intrude on American patriotism. The De Vargas Pageant also featured a racially diverse cast. Spanish soldiers were played by members of the local chapter of the Alianza Hispano-Americana, the southwestern mutual aid society, while the part of Vargas was acted by George Washington Armijo, the grandson of J. Francisco Chaves and a rising figure in the Republican Party. Having served alongside Max Luna in the 1898 Rough Riders, Armijo was a former aide to Theodore Roosevelt, who in turn was godfather to Armijo’s son, Theodore Roosevelt Armijo. As one who moved easily between Hispano and Anglo worlds, Armijo symbolized the racial cooperation behind the pageant. Like Santa Fe’s new architecture, his performance as Vargas recalled Spanish heroism without the unpleasant tinge of los paisanos. 18 In a less obvious way, Armijo and his performance also offer insight into the character of Santa Fe’s racial hierarchy. Despite Hispanos’ numerical dominance, power in the capital city lay largely in the hands of Anglo businesspeople and civic promoters. In 1915 the New Mexico Business Directory listed 169 private enterprises in Santa Fe owned or operated by Anglos, a combination of bankers, lawyers, doctors, dentists, real estate agents, engineers, surveyors, saloon owners, grocers, and barbers. Hispanos, by contrast, owned or operated only 55 private businesses, the vast majority of them groceries, bakeries, shoe-making shops, or barbershops. Often formulating their plans behind the closed doors of business and fraternal clubs, Anglo entrepreneurs took it for granted that they pulled the strings and reaped the rewards of Santa Fe’s promotional gambits.19 Most Hispanos remained outside the circle of business deals. Spanish-speaking shopkeepers and laborers lived in close proximity to Anglo leaders—for Santa Fe was, after all, a town of a few thousand residents—but in 1912 their language, religion, and daily customs were not considered the stuff of historical pageants. The only real source of Hispano influence was the ballot box. By gaining elected or appointed office, los nativos earned the opportunity to work alongside or even represent the Anglo newcomers. In 1911, for example, seven of ten elected county officials were Hispano, and Santa Fe’s representative to the territorial legislature was Georgetown-educated Roman L. Baca, a Republican stalwart. The political balance ensured that the De Vargas

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Pageant materialized only after business leaders James Seligman and Samuel Cartwright collaborated with county treasurer Celso López, city marshal Nicolas Sena, and supreme court clerk José Sena, Jr. Nonetheless, at each level of political power, Hispano influence was checked or channeled by Anglo newcomers. Whatever their own motives, local Hispano leaders often trimmed their sails to fit Anglo business interests. Hence the significance of Armijo as Vargas. At the very moment racial conflict was roiling the waters of territorial and state politics, Armijo was the perfect public figure for anxious Anglos. Committed above all to his American patriotism and the Republican Party, Armijo, unlike Larrazolo or Lucero, never raised the possibility of mounting an Hispano opposition.20

The Invented Fiesta After six years of inactivity, Vargas returned to Santa Fe for good in 1919. That year Edgar Hewett and his associates instituted the Santa Fe Fiesta, a three-day program of historical dramas designed, at least nominally, to commemorate the return of Spanish authority in 1692. Looking for something bigger and better than the short-lived De Vargas Pageant, the organizers adopted a “tricultural” format: the first day, “Before Santa Fe Was,” featured Native American ceremonial dances; the second, “Santa Fe Antigua,” centered on the Vargas entrada; and the third, “Santa Fe Moderna,” highlighted the arrival of the American soldiers in 1846. It was the final day, which also paid tribute to New Mexico’s veterans of the Great War, that dominated the festival. With the return of American soldiers from Europe, not to mention the hyper-patriotism of the immediate postwar years, an emphasis on “Santa Fe Moderna” was inescapable. Tributes to the military victory ensured that the familiar theme of historical progress, culminating in a salute to present-day America, was not lost on spectators.21 Yet neither Spanish reconquest nor American patriotism set the tone of the next few years. Hewett and his museum colleagues always envisioned the Fiesta less as a tribute to either Spanish or Anglo conquerors than to Native American culture. Even as headlines heralded the return of “Old Spanish Splendor” and spectators watched rousing reenactments of “Santa Fe Trail Days,” Indian jewelry, crafts, and ceremonial dances took center stage. Throughout the 1920s performers from San Juan, Tesuque, Santo Domingo, Santa Clara, San Ildefonso, and

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Cochiti Pueblos traveled to the capital city each fall to regale spectators with their religious ceremonies, including the Basket, Green Corn, and Eagle Dances. Beginning in 1922, the annual Southwest Indian Fair was held concurrently with the Fiesta, offering spectators a chance to buy Indian jewelry, blankets, and pottery. As early as 1922, John DeHuff, superintendent of the U.S. Indian School at Santa Fe, announced that the Fiesta “has come to be the center toward which a large contingent of people moves every year to see something spectacular and satisfying in the way of native art and ceremonial.” The next year El Palacio, the publication of the Museum of New Mexico, proudly proclaimed that “[t]he Indian ceremonies were the main feature of the Fiesta program from the opening day until the closing night.” 22 It was no accident that interest in Native American ceremonies grew at the moment described by Oliver La Farge as the “nadir of the Indians.” In the early twenties, New Mexico Republicans Albert Fall and Holm Bursum formed a plan to shore up the Old Guard’s core constituency of Anglo and Hispano ranchers. The so-called Bursum Bill established a legal means for non-Indians to obtain title to Pueblo lands they had purchased or simply occupied for a fixed period. Although the proposal was defeated in Congress in 1923, a simultaneous challenge was leveled on the cultural front. For years Protestant missionaries had asked the federal government to curb the public performance of Indian ceremonial dances. The offending dances were considered lewd, immoral, or simply a waste of time during the short growing season. After some tentative steps, Charles Burke, commissioner of Indian Affairs, issued a public “Message to All Indians” that threatened punitive action unless the dances were curtailed. Hewett opposed Burke’s position, and he ultimately gained an exemption for dances staged at the Fiesta.23 At least in Hewett’s view, the exemption favored local Indians, for it offered them the chance to profit from their craft work and revive their “waning culture.” The Pueblos themselves were less enthusiastic. “We are too poor. We can’t afford to lose for the benefit of Santa Fe,” Cochiti Pueblo governor José Alcario Montoya wrote to Hewett’s colleague, Lansing Bloom. Bloom eventually satisfied Montoya after he agreed to pay a stipend of $7.50 a day. Although Fiesta visitors knew little of the negotiations, they were surely excited at the prospect of attending an otherwise-forbidden performance.24 Yet Hewett did not present the Pueblo dances as attention-grabbing spectacles. On the contrary, he envisioned them as distinctly highbrow productions. Just as the Southwest Indian Fair encouraged buyers to

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think of pottery or turquoise jewelry as objects worthy of the discriminating collector, Hewett and other prominent spectators regarded the dances as performances of a sophisticated, if enigmatic, artistic inspiration. Clearly unlike productions of the big-city theater or opera house, the colorful and graceful dances nonetheless seemed to attain a comparable level of virtuosity. One journalist noted that “America had developed drama, music, painting, and poetry of tremendous beauty and dignity centuries before the coming of the white man.” The Fiesta, the writer continued, offered spectators the chance to “live over a cycle of American culture history that has been rescued from oblivion.” The only practical shortcoming of the performances was the Pueblo voice. Because Pueblo singing did not conform to a standard melodic scale, Hewett recruited professional Indian performers. The most prominent was Tsianina, a Creek-Cherokee. Though lacking tribal ties to southwestern Indians, Tsianina’s operatic voice, classical training, and dramatic appearance suited the elevated atmosphere. The genteel mood was further refined by alterations of the performance space. In 1920 Hewett fenced in the viewing area in front of the Palace of the Governors, built a grandstand in the plaza, and constructed boxes for local and visiting dignitaries. The largest box went to Governor and Mrs. Edwin Meechem. Hewett welcomed to his box the writer Harriet Welles and the Russian artist Nicholai Constantinovitch Roerich. Another section was reserved for New Mexico’s well-known artists, including Mr. and Mrs. Julius Rolshoven, Gustave Baumann, Sheldon Parsons, and Victor Higgins.25 The staging of Indian dance as virtuoso performance dovetailed with Santa Fe’s strategy for attracting tourists. Since 1912 civic promoters had marketed the town as a mecca for well-to-do visitors intent on experiencing a distinctly southwestern high culture.26 What chiefly animated that culture, as it had since tourists first traversed the Southwest on the Santa Fe Railway, was the imagery of Native Americans. Visitors relished Indian clothing, jewelry, pottery, and, in particular, the quiet inspiration they found at the Pueblo village. Few of them, of course, had any intention of living as Indians. Even the writer Mabel Dodge Luhan, although she married the Taos Indian Antonio Luján (she modified his name), resided in a resplendent adobe mansion and hired servants to do her chores. Yet like Luhan, hundreds of tourists each year arrived in New Mexico with the desire to experience and perhaps possess the outward expressions of Pueblo life. Although visitors rarely put it in such formulaic terms, Indians stood for the ideal of primitive authenticity (against twentieth-century artifice), nonalienated labor (against class

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divisions and assembly lines), and a pure American artistic tradition (against European derivatives).27 Whatever the precise motives of their guests, tourist promoters understood that the Indian was in high demand, and they accordingly used Spanish colonial-type buildings and furnishings, such as the Alvarado Hotel at Albuquerque and La Fonda in Santa Fe, to fashion a stage for the display and purchase of the Indian experience.28 Hewett and his colleagues saw a like function in the Fiesta. Although billed as a revival of the observance of 1712, even its name—it was known as the “Santa Fe Pageant” as late as May 1919 —was selected with an eye to tourism.29 One reason for redesignating it the “Santa Fe Fiesta” involved southern California’s experience with a fiesta of its own. Beginning in 1894, Santa Fe’s longtime rival put on a bombastic annual festival under the title “La Fiesta de Los Angeles.” Spanish in name rather than character, the West Coast event involved parades of lights and flowers, along with sports and masquerade balls. During its heyday in the 1890s, the Los Angeles Merchants’ Association raised thousands of dollars in subscriptions and onlookers numbered an estimated twenty-five thousand.30 Beyond its success in Los Angeles, the fiesta concept suggested the participation of an entire community. The name brought to mind the readiness of Spanish-speaking villagers to set aside their interests for the sake of their community. A pageant, wrote El Palacio in 1919, confines most residents to the audience. A fiesta makes “the entire populace . . . part of the celebration.” 31 Thus the great irony of the Santa Fe Fiesta. Even as it recalled the entrada of 1692, its enclosed stage shows, always spotlighting Indian ceremony, excluded the town’s numerous Spanish-speaking people. Nor did the inclusion of “Spanish” songs, dances, and historical commemorations consistently feature elite Hispanos in starring roles. Unlike the De Vargas Pageant of 1911 and 1912, performances of the early twenties were often directed and sometimes even performed by Anglo volunteers. In 1921, for example, local resident Emory Moore replaced George Washington Armijo as Vargas, and the roles of his soldiers were shared by Anglos and Hispanos.32 The decline of Hispano participation makes sense when one considers the indifference and even hostility nativos felt toward Indians and Indian performance. Generations of Hispano ancestors had defined their civilization against New Mexico’s Indians, and family memories of spilled blood and slain children remained vivid. Although settlers had always distinguished Pueblo Indians from the more hostile nomadic groups, racial and cultural mixing with the Pueblos was largely confined to the seventeenth century. Fol-

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lowing the reconquest, Hispanos and Pueblos lived largely apart, often in a state of mutual suspicion. Gov. Octaviano Larrazolo made the general disposition clear in his Fiesta proclamation of 1919. Remembering the “noble efforts and endeavors to combat paganism,” he recalled the “struggle between the soldiers of Christ, on the one hand, and the ignorant savages that dwell on this soil.” 33 Pueblo-Hispano animosity was only heightened by modern-day concerns. In the early twenties the threat of the Bursum Bill prompted an energetic effort to restore Indian land and water rights then in the hands of Anglos and Hispanos. Prominent Hispanos, in turn, spoke out on behalf of paisano ranchers and farmers, comparing the subsidies spent on Native Americans to the complete absence of support for the paisano. Hispano leaders also contrasted the “declining” state of New Mexican Indians to the vigorous descendants of intrepid settlers. One of the more outspoken commentators was Adelina (Nina) OteroWarren, the daughter of the ill-fated Manuel B. Otero. In the early twenties, while serving as a federal inspector of Indian schools, she described Native Americans as a people “whose heads and hearts are not like our own,” a people “decreed” by the laws of civilization to disappear as a distinct race. Supported lavishly by the federal government, Otero continued, New Mexico’s Indians mock the twelve thousand “people of Spanish blood” living within the boundaries of old Pueblo land grants, the ancestors of whom once “assumed ‘the White Man’s burden’ in the Southwest” amid “the crushing burdens of civilised colonization.” Sentiments like Otero-Warren’s were rarely expressed in public, and they were particularly unwelcome amid the Fiesta’s spirit of civic promotion and all-around good cheer. But on occasion they got out. One bit of jeering came from the well-known civic leader José Sena, Jr. During the Indian ceremonies, as genteel Anglos sat in rapt silence, Sena poked fun at how much they were earning and how in his estimation they were likely to spend their wages. “Translating” the solemn address of one visiting Indian chief, Sena had him say to the audience: “After this, boys, I’ll have to set up the drinks, and it will cost me seven dollars and a half.” 34

“Fiesta for the Gente” In 1924 the Santa Fe Fiesta began to take on an institutional look. After supervising the festival informally in its first five seasons, Hewett and the Museum of New Mexico assumed official control. To farm out the

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now-numerous tasks of planning and production, Hewett established a council of seventeen men, most of whom were either colleagues from the museum or local businessmen. Only one of the seventeen, José Sena, was Hispano. Of greatest concern for the council were the twin questions of growth and financing. Although the size of the Fiesta’s audience was gradually increasing—1,400 spectators attended in 1922, 2,000 in 1924 —the numbers were a far cry from Los Angeles’s draw thirty years earlier, and revenues were not meeting expenditures. To raise the Fiesta’s profile, the council opted to create a truly professional production, one with hired stage specialists to direct various phases of performance.35 Not all Santa Feans approved of the change. Some claimed that it further divorced the Fiesta from the lives of the local residents. The loudest complaint came from Santa Fe’s small but increasingly visible community of artists and writers. During the teens, owing partly to the “discovery” of Taos just after 1900, a steady stream of creative migrants found their way to Santa Fe. Before 1915 was out the New York painters Sheldon Parsons and Gerald Cassidy had arrived. In 1916 the poet Alice Corbin and her husband, the painter William Penhallow Henderson, moved from Chicago. By 1920 the painters Olive Rush, Robert Henri, Marsden Hartley, Will Shuster, Gustave Baumann, Randall Davey, and John Sloan had all come. Over the next four years they were joined by, among others, three outstanding women and men of letters: Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant in 1920, Witter Bynner in 1922, and Mary Austin in 1924. Most of the newcomers gravitated to the capital city for reasons of creativity or health; they were looking for inspiration or a few more years of life, not for a new political cause.36 Yet a good many found it hard to leave their taste for social criticism in the big city. They became embroiled in a range of issues, from the serious matter of Indian land rights to the parochial claim that paintings at the new Museum of Fine Arts were propagandizing Bolshevism. In all matters Edgar Hewett was generally considered a faithful ally. He stood behind Indian rights, backed the artists in the museum controversy, and generally welcomed people of creative talent. By 1924, however, the relationship had become strained. Hewett’s fastidious and arrogant bearing grated on the more freewheeling newcomers. And his plans for a bigger and more professional Fiesta left them with little say in organizing or directing the event.37 To quiet murmurs of disaffection, Hewett and the chamber of commerce named the poet Witter Bynner to the Fiesta Council and put him in charge of the newly created Pasatiempo (Pastime) Committee. By al-

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lowing Bynner to hold “El Pasatiempo,” a set of free, unrehearsed, and offbeat festivities, Hewett apparently believed that everyone would be satisfied. Bynner had a different view. In an article appearing in that September’s Laughing Horse, a small literary journal begun by Bynner’s companion, Spud Johnson, at Berkeley in 1922, the poet argued that tourism and commercialization were destroying the integrity of Santa Fe. “We are attracting people here. We are advertising. We are boosting. We can not care enough that, by professionalizing the apparent difference of Santa Fe, we are killing the real difference.” 38 Helping Bynner to celebrate “the real difference” was Dolly Sloan, the wife of the New York artist John Sloan. Like her husband, Dolly Sloan was both a socialist and a dynamic, on-the-street social critic. She assisted in the campaign of Socialist candidate Eugene Debs in 1912 and worked alongside her husband in designing the stage setting for the Patterson Strike Pageant, the huge dramatization of the 1913 Patterson, New Jersey, textile strike. In the Pasatiempo, Sloan may have seen the possibility of unleashing in Santa Fe something of the energy and spontaneity of the working-class Manhattan neighborhoods that she knew so well. Envisioning the Pasatiempo as a radically alternative event, she and Bynner set out to make a “Fiesta for the Gente.” Averse to closed venues and professional performers, they turned the plaza into a “native market” where Spanish-speaking farmers from nearby villages sold chile and apples. They encouraged local Hispanos to take part in singing, dancing, and general merrymaking. Most notably, the Pasatiempo Committee created the “Hysterical Parade,” a takeoff on Hewett’s serious historical pageantry that combined a wild costume show with a burlesque of well-known figures and events. Donning old clothes and decorating their cars and burros, residents from all walks of life took part.39 Sloan and Bynner liked what they saw, but as relative newcomers, they could not have understood the full significance of putting the long-obscured paisanos at the center of attention. Nor was the pair situated to interpret and promote the phenomenon to a broad reading public. That task fell to the veteran newspaperman E. Dana Johnson, editor of the Santa Fe New Mexican and member of both the Pasatiempo Committee and the Fiesta Council. Johnson was as interested in tourist dollars as the businessmen who read his columns, but he believed the Fiesta’s popularity and revenues would only increase if professional pageantry was diminished in favor of paisano-centered festivities. In an editorial appearing at the end of July, he prepared local residents for the fall coming out. By holding an old-fashioned fiesta, he

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wrote, “[w]e are keeping alive all the beauty and grace of the Spanish culture.” His choice of words was no accident. By referring to the area’s “Spanish culture,” he elevated ordinary Hispanos, transforming them in public discourse from obscure farmers and herders into a people who deserved respect. Rather than import professionals to direct performances, he argued, the Fiesta should draw its strength from the singing, dancing, and daily customs so integral to Santa Fe’s milieu. The fine old folk dances and the songs of our Spanish people, their ancient customs, are as worthy of preservation as the Eagle Dance or the Corn ceremonial. . . . The Fiesta is not a hired performance behind a ticket gate to be managed by a few showmen. It is Santa Fe celebrating, as she has celebrated annually for centuries.40

That Johnson was sincerely interested in preserving Santa Fe’s “Spanish culture” is beyond doubt. He later worked side by side with Mary Austin in championing so-called Spanish colonial arts, and he regarded “old Spanish customs” as one of his “hobbies.” His affections chilled, however, when the subject shifted from friendly paisanos to aggressive Hispano politicians. Described as “the strongest kind of southern democrat with all their prejudices [sic],” Johnson held special contempt for Octaviano Larrazolo and his “native son” movement.41 It was only out of loyalty to the owner of the New Mexican, the progressive Republican Bronson Cutting, that Johnson came to tolerate Larrazolo on the editorial page. Loyalty to Cutting also helps to explain why Johnson so enthusiastically promoted a local “Spanish culture.” During the 1920s, Cutting became New Mexico’s single most powerful politician. New York born and Harvard educated, the scholarly, reserved, and homosexual mugwump seemed a most unlikely candidate for the role of statewide jefe político. After stumbling off the westbound train in 1910, critically ill with tuberculosis, Cutting soon regained his health in the dry air and prospered in New Mexico’s political climate. His twin advantages were wealth and a brilliant understanding of state politics. He realized immediately that the key to success lay in mobilizing New Mexico’s neglected Hispano base. In 1912 he purchased the New Mexican, removing it from Paul Walter’s conservative editorial direction and turning it over to Dana Johnson. Throughout the 1910s, by supporting progressive candidates and Spanish-language newspapers, Cutting gradually eroded the strength of the Republican Old Guard. And by loaning untold amounts of his personal fortune to both prominent Hispanos (such as Gov. Miguel Antonio Otero) and not-so-prominent

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paisanos, Cutting created a loyal personal following. His chief biographer calls him a “one-man welfare agency.” Cutting’s reputation as New Mexico’s Anglo patrón repaid him with a U.S. Senate seat in 1928 and a stunning reelection in 1934, when he upset local and national expectations by holding his Hispano base against the Democrat Dennis Chávez.42 Cutting avoided glorifying los paisanos as descendants of Spanish colonists. He argued repeatedly that progress would come only when the state gained an untinted view of its deplorable lack of educational and economic opportunities. Yet he also exploited long-standing animosities by comparing the fortunes of Pueblos and paisanos. In contrast to the “vast sums which have been spent for the benefit of the Indian,” Cutting declared in 1928, the “native people” have received virtually nothing. His sympathy with los paisanos also corresponded to his rift with Edgar Hewett. Since Cutting’s takeover of the New Mexican in 1912, neither man had lost an opportunity to ridicule the other. Their feud reverberated throughout state politics, for it was Cutting’s sworn political enemy, the Republican Old Guard, that enabled Hewett to control the Museum of New Mexico, the state’s most important cultural institution. Thus the political importance of “Spanish culture.” Johnson’s effusive praise, though it reflected his own perspective, also served to score political points for his boss and undermine support for Indian performances and their master of ceremonies, Edgar Hewett.43 Hewett’s agreement to hold “El Pasatiempo” in 1924 did little to satisfy the artists and writers who opposed him. In 1925 he aggravated tensions by moving the Fiesta from September to August to have it coincide with an Indian dance at Santo Domingo Pueblo. The next year hostilities came to a boil. Advocates of the Pasatiempo were once again displeased that the Fiesta Council had imported out-of-town artists to orchestrate a professional pageant, in this case composer Charles Cadman Wakefield and Metropolitan Opera star Rafaelo Díaz. The advocates were further dismayed by the decision to stage shows in the new “Indian Theater” north of town. They had little interest in trekking to an isolated amphitheater to watch opera performers, Pueblo dancers, and classically trained Cherokee, Mohawk, and Choctaw singers, all of whom only diminished Hispano festivities on the plaza. Pasatiempo backers suspected a deliberate effort to slight the locals. They pointed to comments such as the following, which appeared in the museum’s publication: “[U]nless this is to be merely a fiesta for the ‘home-folks,’ the performers must submit to training; not for a few rehearsals only,

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but the year ‘round. If they, like the players of Ober Ammergau, invite the world, they must give the world the best that is in them. . . . ‘Homefolks’ may applaud a crude performance, but not the world.” 44 Having initially supported the new arena, Dana Johnson was also disturbed by its implications. On his editorial page he called for an end to nonsouthwestern Indian dances and imported opera stars. “[T]he Spanish people,” he wrote, “should have at least one full day for their real Fiesta.” The literati had a still stronger reaction. “The Fiesta this year was simply ghastly,” Mary Austin wrote to Ina Sizer Cassidy. “What everybody is saying now is that before Santa Fe can hope to recover from it there will have to be a hanging, meaning of course our friend at the Museum.” That “friend” was Edgar Hewett. Witter Bynner and Dolly Sloan responded by staging a separate Pasatiempo in early September, one month after the formal Fiesta. They excluded Indian ceremonies and, to welcome the poorest paisanos, decreed that no money would change hands. Modern dress was replaced with serapes and mantillas. News of the event deliberately went unpromoted, excepting the handbills, printed in Spanish and posted in nearby villages, that invited Hispano farmers and ranchers to join the festivities. At the festival’s conclusion, a satisfied Dana Johnson called the Pasatiempo “the most brilliant and picturesque carnival Santa Fe has seen, [proving] more strikingly than ever the pricelessness of the treasure of Spanish culture. . . . If Paddy’s pig were here he’d be more Spanish than Irish tonight.” 45

The Politics of “Spanish Culture” The schism of 1926 might not have come to pass had a parallel controversy not erupted. Earlier that year news leaked out that the Southwest Federation of Women’s Clubs planned to build a summer retreat in Santa Fe. Incorporated on April 26 as the Culture Center of the Southwest, the retreat was planned to accommodate three thousand women interested in New Mexico’s history. Hewett happily encouraged the project. Almost since the moment he took charge of the School of American Archaeology and the Museum of New Mexico in 1909, he had promised to create an adult summer school in which well-to-do students would attend his seminars, visit Indian pueblos, and take part in archaeological excavations. The Culture Center offered the best hope of finally attracting affluent pupils.46 The project likewise fit the ongoing

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campaign to lure the well-heeled tourist and migrant to Santa Fe. As rail fares dropped and automobile travel grew more practical, civic leaders, using a common saying of the twenties, remained wary of visitors who “come to town with a clean collar and a dollar bill—and change neither.” The best advice Santa Fe received from its “intelligent visitors,” noted the New Mexican, “is to guard against bringing here the kind of a horde which has imposed a burden and has not given anything to Los Angeles, against flooding these mountains with the tin can type of tourist, against the whole jazz element of America which is hooting its blatant way ‘On the Road to Elsewhere.’” By welcoming genteel ladies from Oklahoma City and Dallas, the Culture Center promised to deliver the class of visitor who could boost local revenues and sustain a highbrow atmosphere.47 Backers of the Culture Center, including Hewett, Walter, the chamber of commerce, and the Santa Fe Railway, anticipated universal support. What they got was sharp and immediate criticism. An alliance of writers, artists, philanthropists, educators, and rival business owners immediately formed the oppositional Old Santa Fe Association. The group dedicated itself to “guiding new growth . . . in such a way as to sacrifice as little as possible of the unique charm and distinction of this city.” Unsure of what it had in mind, Hewett in any case did not take seriously an organization whose members had lived in Santa Fe less than a decade. Dismissing “the little group of newcomers,” Hewett derided their statements as the “pronouncement[s] of the three tailors of Tooley Street.” Lifetime Santa Fe resident Ruth Laughlin Barker likewise distinguished the stridency of upstart critics—she referred to them collectively as “New Santa Fe”—and the hospitality of old-timers who had devoted their lives to improving the town.48 As Hewett, Walter, and Barker waited for the controversy to blow over, the Old Santa Fe Association went on the attack. Led by Austin, Bynner, and Johnson, it launched a national publicity campaign that redefined the Culture Center issue. Instead of newcomer versus oldtimer, it identified a problem well known to educated eastern audiences: the invasion of the middlebrow masses. The coming of the Culture Center, it argued, was merely one manifestation of a crisis facing all discriminating Americans. Just as middle-class tastes had proliferated in the United States, so, too, would they overwhelm an undefended Santa Fe. That line of argument was nothing if not perilous. If a bald defense of cultural hierarchy was more acceptable then than now, it nonetheless threatened to mark the critics as disagreeable snobs. Yet their clever use

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of language carried the day. They first of all labeled the Culture Center a “Chautauqua,” the late-nineteenth-century institution of popular adult education, often held, like a feverish religious revival, under an outdoor tent. The proposed “Chautauqua,” wrote Mary Austin, was not a true center of learning but a gathering spot for middle-class yearners who, in consuming their “superficial predigested study courses,” only succeeded in diminishing the “creative spirit” of the true artistic genius. “Certainly there is nothing Santa Fe needs less than a Chautauqua,” she wrote, “with its lower middle class standards.” Austin and her allies next turned to the home states of the federation women, attacking “Texas and Oklahoma club women” and their “Middle-Western” traits. Finally, the critics raised the specter of “Main Street” America. The visitors, Dana Johnson wrote, threatened to “bring a Main Street flavor from the Missouri.” Austin invoked the leading opponent of “Main Street” himself. “When the last beauty spots of America have been filled with dance pavilions and hot dog stands,” she asked plaintively, “when the Babbitts are ensconced in every apple orchard and every hillock, where will Sinclair Lewis and the natives flee?” 49 The criticism baffled the Culture Center’s supporters. How, they asked, could wealthy and educated federation women be judged a threat? Was not their affluence, their cultured bearing, and their readiness for academic study precisely what was wanted in out-of-the-way New Mexico? What the Culture Center’s supporters could not appreciate was how quickly a new cultural ideal was gaining currency in the 1920s, in Santa Fe and throughout the United States. When Dana Johnson paid tribute to Santa Fe’s “Spanish culture,” he adumbrated a sentiment that was best articulated in the anthropological work of Franz Boas (a vociferous critic of Edgar Hewett) and in a trio of his disciples, Ruth Benedict, Robert Redfield, and Margaret Mead.50 Johnson and his allies were not anthropologists, of course. But they shared an admiration for what another social scientist called a “genuine culture,” a harmonious order in which all activities— economic, sexual, spiritual, and aesthetic—take their place in an integrated social organism. The author of that term was Edward Sapir, a linguistic anthropologist whose outwardly dispassionate writing in the early twenties belied his sharp criticisms of twentieth-century America. “A genuine culture,” Sapir wrote, “cannot be defined as a sum of abstractly desirable ends, as a mechanism. It must be looked upon as a sturdy plant growth, each remotest leaf and twig of which is organically fed by the sap at the core.” In other

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words, the ideal culture was one in which each individual’s behavior and aspirations fit into an organic relationship with the larger processes and requirements of society. Just as root and branch are unique but indispensable parts of a tree, an organic culture integrated the unique identities and functions of all members. What bothered Sapir and other less erudite observers of the 1920s was the apparently bottomless capacity of Western civilization for contradiction and alienation. The individual’s pursuit of meaning and self-fulfillment appeared to be constrained at every turn by the casualties of economic warfare, the drudgery of the assembly line, and the moral and sexual taboos of a “sophisticated” society. At the heart of the problem, according to Sapir and others, was the tendency of modern society to sever the individual mind from social ends, to reduce, in the name of mechanistic behavior, the unique individual to a uniform means of social production.51 To the minority of Americans who spoke in such terms, and even to many who did not, it was the standardized middle of American life, often symbolized by residents of “Main Street” or, after 1929, of “Middletown,” that presented the greatest threat. Conversely, it was the seemingly least sophisticated, premodern society that offered lessons for cultural rebirth. Hence Ruth Benedict’s fieldwork among the Zuni and Robert Redfield’s study of the Indians of Tepoztlán. Yet if such Indian communities lured the ethnographer, they stood apart in important ways from America’s celebrated “folk” peoples. Indians were alien to the folk tradition, commonly understood as Anglo-Saxon, that linked the cultured urbanite to rough-hewn parts of white America.52 Nor did socially progressive observers on the upper Rio Grande regard Indians as the best neighbors. The more avant-garde Anglo sojourner could easily write a book about the Pueblos. She could admire their dances, or depict them in painting. Living among them, much less dancing with them at the Fiesta, was a different story. Far more attractive as potential bearers of folk wisdom were northern New Mexico’s paisanos. Exotic in Anglo eyes, Hispano farmers were sufficiently distant from an industrializing America to offer the warm embrace of a genuine folk culture. Yet as Christian descendants of Spanish colonists, they were also considered European enough in heritage to make Anglos feel welcome in the Spanish-speaking neighborhood. One of the more revealing accounts of that perception was penned by the writer Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant in 1922. In diary entries serialized by Harper’s, Sergeant described the exquisite delight of leaving Philadelphia to live in a crumbling “mud house” in Tesuque, a village just north

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of Santa Fe. During her stay, Sergeant saw the Pueblos only from afar. Entranced by outward expressions of Pueblo culture, she nonetheless failed to penetrate into Indians’ interior lives. By contrast, the Hispano people opened their doors and souls, cradling her with hospitality. They built the walls and roof of her house, and they provided shelter as she traveled through northern New Mexico. They “adored one another,” she wrote, just as much as “they adored having unexpected guests.” As she nodded off to sleep one night in an unfamiliar house, she watched her host family gather for dinner around an outdoor lantern. “The picture,” she wrote, “softly irradiated by the yellow glow, hung, like some old Spanish painting of a peasant group, on the dark wall of night.” 53 Sergeant’s account suggests why the Old Santa Fe Association reacted with such hostility to the Culture Center. Among the group’s several motives, it was the desire to preserve Santa Fe’s essence, its beloved “Spanish culture,” that aroused the strongest support. The association proudly advertised itself as the “agency” behind El Pasatiempo and the revival of northern New Mexico’s “old Spanish arts and crafts.” It also noted its alliance with the town’s two largest Spanish-speaking organizations, La Unión Protectiva, a mutual aid society of some three hundred members, and El Centro de Cultura, a new club for middleclass Hispanos that arranged literary, musical, and social events. Members of both organizations were described by the association as “Spanish descendants of our Colonial settlers.” 54 What the association feared above all was that “Texas club women” would lack the appreciation to preserve Santa Fe’s delicate Hispano culture. The critics not only cringed at the thought of camp houses and carnival attractions amid the town’s adobes. They also worried that southern and midwestern intolerance would poison warm relations with paisano neighbors. There is no reason to doubt the association’s sincerity. Yet one must note how eagerly its members seized the opportunity to attack the Culture Center. In beating back the “Texas club women,” wealthy supporters of the association, such as Amelia Elizabeth White, and its more impecunious members, such as Mary Austin, found a common source of social distinction. When White warned a friend that “old Santa Fe would vanish before this swarm of locusts,” she seemed to relish the chance to define her social status as an arts patron against a middlebrow America. Similarly, as much as Austin disliked the prospect of the Culture Center, she welcomed an opportunity to regale national and local readers with the evils of “Main Street,” thus gaining recognition for her critical insight. In keeping out the new, the idea of “Old Santa Fe” thus

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suited people of very different means, all of whom found value in the warmhearted paisano. Whereas status on the upper Rio Grande was once a matter of distancing oneself from the lowly “Mexican,” it was now available to the person who could marshal elements of “Spanish culture”—its architecture, handmade crafts, songs and dances, and religious rituals—and turn them against the specter of Main Street. The best place to do that was at the new Santa Fe Fiesta.55 The Culture Center issue was settled quietly at the end of 1926. Confronted by growing opposition, the museum and the chamber of commerce lost enthusiasm for the project, and the federation women, bewildered by Santa Fe’s internal debate, looked elsewhere. Having lost the battle, Hewett dismissed its importance, but he could not ignore its consequences. The decision of Bynner and Sloan to stage a separate Pasatiempo in September, one month after the conclusion of the regular Fiesta, prompted his resignation as the festival’s director. His departure set the stage for a new Fiesta regime, although the change did not happen overnight. Stressing the value of “local festivities” and the need to “hold the interest of every citizen,” Fiesta organizers nonetheless continued to seek the “expert guidance” of professionals. Holding out hope of producing a nationally known festival, the Fiesta Council hired Thomas Wood Stevens, creator of the famous Virginia and St. Louis pageants. Stevens responded with “The Pageant of Old Santa Fe,” a two-hour drama of Spanish exploration and colonization since Cabeza de Vaca. Extolled for its artistry, the show emphasized Spanish deeds over Indian ceremonies. Yet its local cast included few Hispanos. Major roles, including those of Cabeza de Vaca, Fray Marcos de Niza, Coronado, Oñate, Peralta, and Otermín, went to Anglos. When Hispanos stayed away in droves the next year, Anglo organizers were left with a thoroughly gloomy Fiesta.56 Seeing the error of its ways, the Fiesta Council changed course in 1929. It scrapped the “anglocized celebration” and “return[ed] the festival to the Spanish Americans.” Intent on reviving the “traditional fiesta of the early days,” Anglos agreed to abandon the contrived pageantry. Under the auspices of La Unión Protectiva, the Fiesta revolved instead around El Mercado, where local villagers sold enchiladas and biscochitos (biscuits or cookies); El Recreo, a program of songs and dances, performed on a platform at the center of the plaza; and the Spanish fair, an exhibition of handmade Hispano weaving and wood carving. Less organized singing, dancing, and frolicking took place in

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streets and on rooftops, often by people decked out in “Spanish” costumes. The merrymaking was anchored by a sequence of solemn events: a Catholic mass at the Cathedral, a candlelight procession to the Cross of the Martyrs, and the De Vargas entrada, narrated to spectators in Spanish and reenacted by an all-Hispano cast. Presented in 1930 by the Alianza Hispano-Americana, the entrada paid tribute to Vargas in a way that costumed Anglo members of the chamber of commerce, mounted awkwardly on horses, had never carried off.57 Standing alongside Vargas and the Franciscans, the new icon of the Fiesta was northern New Mexico’s Hispano people. Homage to Spanish military and clerical heroes was now accompanied, if not eclipsed, by tributes to living Hispanos, rich and poor, the presumed bearers of Spanish colonial tradition. In 1929, for example, La Unión Protectiva and its sister organization, El Auxiliar Feminil, staged an old-style Spanish wedding. Benigno Muñiz, editor of the newspaper El Nuevo Mexicano, organized the Villeros Alegres, a musical group that sang the traditional folk ballads of the wood haulers and sheepherders of the “Spanish hinterland.” In the weekend’s grandest performance, six hundred men and women participated in “Los Ciboleros,” the pageant of Hispano buffalo hunters, one of whose players, eighty-five-year-old Agapito de Herrera, had actually hunted buffalo in 1869. To the likes of Herrera, the New Mexican wrote, Santa Fe extends its welcome. And a hand across the hills to Galisteo and Pecos, to San Miguel and Santa Cruz, to Cordova and Chimayo, to Cienega and Cieneguilla . . . and all the little placitas of the mountains and the valleys, whose people join with us in this Fiesta, bringing their wagons and their melons, their chili [sic], their guitars, their burros and their beautiful handiwork, their arts and customs handed down from the Spanish pioneers.58

The flowering of folkways on the plaza prompted favorable comparisons to earlier Fiestas, now regarded as artificial. Heralded as free, spontaneous, and noncommercial, the new festival was above all lauded as a community celebration, one that cemented the capital city’s “solidarity of a mixed racial life.” Open to all comers, it seemed to bridge old racial divisions. As Dana Johnson had written in 1925, “The Fiesta is a strong amalgamating force, striking down what barriers the ignorant and those without vision seek to raise.” In fact, the Fiesta did encourage the cooperation and mixing of Hispanos and Anglos. By 1930 the Fiesta Council was still overwhelmingly Anglo, but it relied heavily on José Sena, Jr., and Nina Otero-Warren to coordinate Hispano activities.

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During the festivities, Anglos and Hispanos could not help but eat, drink, and dance in close quarters. At the Conquistadores Ball, a Saturday night gala, Otero-Warren and Sena danced alongside Anglo couples like the Kelleys and DeHuffs. Longtime Santa Fe resident Anita Gonzales Thomas recalled that the ball’s mixed character reflected Santa Fe’s strong interracial community of the late twenties and thirties. Before Santa Fe became “layered” in subsequent decades, Thomas said, Anglo residents “were just part of the gente.” Even if the ball catered to Santa Fe’s elite—tickets cost at least $10 —those who did not attend could gather on the plaza to sing, dance, and drink into the night. Gonzales remembers her own excitement, and the dismay of her mother, when she once stayed out until dawn, dancing with artist Will Shuster and his conga line.59 Yet instances of interracial revelry could scarcely lessen Santa Fe’s pervasive and growing inequalities. With Anglos running Santa Fe’s largest commercial establishments—its banks, insurance companies, real estate and law offices—as well as the chamber of commerce and the Women’s Board of Trade, Anglo dominance of the Fiesta Council in the 1920s and 1930s came as no surprise. In 1926 Anglo businesses outnumbered Hispano firms by 220 to 72. By 1931 the ratio was 430 to 79.60 Business interests welcomed the new Fiesta chiefly because its festive atmosphere promised higher revenues than Hewett’s stodgy productions. Following its revamping in 1929, the Fiesta was said to have “weathered the storm of the tourist dollar,” but profits were more important than ever. As the New Mexican acknowledged that same year, “[T]he Fiesta brings the largest crowd of the year into the city. Inevitably and most desirably this means extra trade for the local merchants.” And beyond its value to shop owners, the Fiesta put the city itself in the national spotlight. “The Fiesta,” as one resident reminded the Kiwanis Club, “is our one big advertising medium.” 61 To present Santa Fe’s celebrated racial “solidarity,” organizers incorporated Hispanos into the Anglo-controlled Fiesta, treating them at once with charity and condescension. In 1930, for example, the New Mexican praised the hard work and sincerity of nativo participants: “[The] native people won golden opinions from us Anglos.” Yet organizers were also quick to rein in activities that strayed from the prescribed format. In 1931, when an Hispano merchant charged admission to a dance behind his off-plaza business, the council denied him a permit on the grounds that his enterprise drained spectators from the main events on the plaza.62 If such rulings temporarily chilled the Fiesta spirit, symbols of Span-

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ish heritage always offered renewed warmth. No matter the real divisions among businesspeople, literati, and Hispano residents, all groups could take part in the new way of thinking and talking about nativo New Mexico. The new Fiesta made it perfectly clear that all Hispanos, even the humble and ill-educated paisano, were members of what Dana Johnson lyrically called “la cultura colonial espanola de Nuevo Mexico [sic].” As festive symbols told tourists that the upper Rio Grande was distinct from the larger Mexican Southwest, it offered its Anglo merchants and bohemians a new way of thinking about the laborers who sat next to them on the plaza. Most dramatically, the Spanish symbols enabled all nativos, rich and poor, to seize the Fiesta spotlight. The best opportunity was the Hysterical Parade, the popular burlesque show that began as a takeoff on Hewett’s highbrow historical pageants. Each year after 1924, Anglos tried to outdo the outrageous costumes and clever parodies of previous Fiestas. Hispanos, too, were encouraged to take part, and some of them joined in the spirit of raillery. One satirist, Sheriff Jesús Baca, commented on the state of technological progress in Santa Fe by hitching a team of horses to a brokendown bus. But the participation of most nativos followed a set pattern. While Anglos satirized national and local events, prominent Hispanos used the occasion to celebrate Spanish roots, sometimes by distancing themselves from Mexico. In 1927 Amalia Sánchez, the niece of José Sena, used brown makeup, painted sheep, wigs, and mops to poke fun at Mexican hillbillies. The next year Nina Otero-Warren won first prize for an entry titled “Spanish Portrait.” As the artist John Sloan held a picture frame before her face, she “impersonated” a Velázquez painting by appearing in a yellow, red, and gold Barcelona costume. That same year Benigno Muñiz staged the most grandiose performance yet. With the assistance of members of La Unión Protectiva and El Auxiliar Feminil, a combined troupe of 350 actors, he reenacted Pancho Villa’s 1916 incursion into New Mexico. The “comic” portrayal, featuring a mock battle and execution, registered the distance Hispanos perceived between themselves and the Mexican revolutionary. “[T]o us,” Anita Gonzales Thomas recalled, “Mexicans were foreigners.” 63 Less prominent participants in the parade did not even aspire to humor or spectacle. Instead they presented themselves in a serious vein, as representatives of a Spanish colonial folk. Thus one parade entry in 1928 featured Spanish-speaking figures attired in “old-fashioned” native costumes and riding in a horse-drawn wagon. Another, sponsored by El Centro de Cultura, was a wagon of musicians playing “Spanish”

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melodies. In 1938 an entry of “breath-taking gorgeousness” portrayed four generations of Spanish-speaking women, clad in “historic gowns” and holding Spanish fans. In the same parade, El Club Industrial, a women’s sewing society, displayed only themselves and their finished work. That nativos played such parts reflects a disturbing double standard. While Anglos offered sophisticated and witty commentary on New Mexico, the nation, and the world, Hispanos represented a vision of “Spanish culture.” As Anglos moved easily between temporal roles, playing a Spanish soldier one day and Herbert Hoover the next, nativos, especially paisanos, were confined to the part of humble Spanish colonials, a people whose identities and aspirations were defined by inherited tradition. Now the center of attention and admiration, they nonetheless reduced themselves to living props, much like the old wagons and burros that the Fiesta Council positioned at strategic points around the plaza.64 It was no accident that women assumed big roles in the Hysterical Parade. Women gained prominence as bearers of Spanish colonial tradition partly because of their traditional roles in Hispano communities. When a vegetable market, folk singing, and prepared food became central features of the new Fiesta, women attained a position at least equal to that of Spanish-speaking men. When the Fiesta Council put out the call to increase “participation by [the] natives,” women were indispensable actors. A good example involves trajes, the Anglo term for oldfashioned dresses. Once they became emblems of a Spanish past, elderly Hispanas were encouraged to take them from trunks and model them on the plaza. Yet women also played a symbolic role themselves, one that helps to explain why cooking, folk arts, and trajes took on importance. Since the turn of the century, Spanish heritage had been embodied by two heroic male figures, the conquistador and the Franciscan missionary. Both were embraced by Anglos only because they appeared in the present day as truly historical figures, that is, as heroes who had long since passed from the scene. In the late 1920s, when actual working-class nativos began to fill the streets, a more feminized image was called for. Just as Anglos were more comfortable with paisanos who were “Spanish” rather than mestizo or “Mexican,” they were heartened by a feminized representation of the Spanish folk. As weavers, dressmakers, cooks, and folk dancers, women symbolized a domesticated people, a people who built stable households in picturesque villages. A masculine alternative, embodied in, say, a squad of railroad workers or migrant beet pickers, held far less appeal.65

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Not all Hispanos, it should be noted, were portrayed as a humble folk, nor were all women depicted as keepers of the village hearth. Differences of wealth and social status were represented not only by the male figure of Vargas and his military entourage but by the Fiesta Queen, “La Reina de Santa Fe.” Created in 1927, the Queen had no historical basis and did not participate in the reenactments of Spanish conquest. Her role was solely that of counterpart: against the masculine and martial Vargas, she was a feminine virgin; against the rough-hewn folk, she represented beauty and refinement; against the obviously mestizo villagers, she embodied a purity of Spanish descent. The desired qualities of the Queen were ensured by the process of her selection. All Spanish-speaking women between the ages of sixteen and twenty-four were eligible for the crown, although only the daughters of “well-known Santa Fe families” gained the serious consideration of the Fiesta Council. Beyond a young woman’s social standing, light skin offered a distinct advantage. A relatively dark-complexioned women might still be considered beautiful, and even win the position of La Reina, but her appearance had to be rationalized as characteristic of a “Spanish” form of beauty. Thus the caption of a front-page photograph of Reynalda Ortiz, the 1938 Fiesta Queen, explained how this “member of one of New Mexico’s most prominent families . . . clearly typifies the dark beauty of her people.” 66 Juxtaposed to weavers and wood-carvers, La Reina also signified the Hispano gentry’s liminal position in Santa Fe’s social order. As had long been true of Spanish-speaking patrones, Fiesta organizers such as José Sena, Jr., and Nina Otero-Warren stood between Anglos and los paisanos. Comfortable in both groups, they gained prestige from their role as go-betweens, the envoys who coordinated the two groups’ separate interests. Affiliated with elite Anglos in business and at social events, members of the Hispano gentry were not above distancing themselves from the paisanos, often by claiming direct descent from the original conquistadors. But like the orator Eusebio Chacón, or the kingmaker Solomon Luna, or the politician and cultural spokesman Antonio Lucero, Sena and Otero-Warren understood that their prestige in Anglo society depended on their recognized status as leaders of los paisanos. Indeed, their dependence on Hispano farmers and sheepherders only grew as the twentieth century progressed. As Anglos tightened their control of New Mexico’s political economy, the Hispano gentry had fewer and fewer political and economic resources to fall back on. Just as Sena could not hope to command the political influence of

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his father, Major José Sena, so, too, Otero-Warren, defeated in her bid for Congress in 1922, lacked the support given her illustrious Rio Abajo ancestors. Nor could she forget how her father, Manuel B. Otero, had been gunned down in 1883 and his patrimony, the enormous Bartolome Baca Grant, opened to Anglo homesteaders. As they reflected on the changes in their families, both Sena and Otero-Warren well understood where New Mexican society was headed. They therefore took the best course available to them. Building on their family names, they gained recognition as leaders of northern New Mexico’s newly recognized “Spanish culture” and did their best to keep it vital and visible.67 Sena and Otero-Warren had good reason to believe that the staging of paisano dances and crafts could only heighten interracial solidarity and respect. After all, the Fiesta put farmers and laborers at the center of the stage, literally and figuratively. If paisano participants were somewhat less concerned than Dana Johnson about the luster of a “Spanish culture,” they well understood that the Fiesta offered an opportunity to present their folkways to an audience that had recently excluded them. It is therefore tempting to regard the new Santa Fe Fiesta as a political breakthrough for los paisanos, an “empowering” event for a people who had long been disparaged, ignored, or taken for granted by numerous elite New Mexicans, both Anglo and Hispano. That conclusion is not inconsistent with recent scholarship on public ceremonies and festivals. Examining such events as fiestas and parades, scholars have posed the question of how activities such as dancing and general merrymaking both reflect and change a community’s contours of power.68 One common answer is that rituals embolden and strengthen participants, both by subverting informal rules of social control and by marking out a public space in which formerly excluded people can express themselves, if not their concrete interests. As one historian of parades has suggested, merely stepping onto a public streetscape constitutes a powerful political act. Particularly for working-class revelers, the argument goes, parades and festivals have always offered chances to communicate solidarity with peers, to assert independence from authority, and to proclaim their basic dignity.69 The Santa Fe Fiesta provided each of those benefits. It could not, however, erase assumptions about the innate differences between los paisanos and their Anglo audience. Even as Anglos and Hispanos danced in the streets, sometimes with each other, the festivities only papered over the racial rift that divided them. And even as the Fiesta elevated los paisanos to new heights of public recognition, it still represented them

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(and they sometimes represented themselves) as a people of the timeless Hispano past, now bearing the warm smile of the village hearth. Images of Hispano backwardness were important not because everyone embraced them—the villagers certainly had their own ideas—but because as expressions of an Hispano “folk culture,” featured as the centerpiece of the capital city’s annual festival, they became central to the dominant understanding of who los paisanos were. In the context of widening socioeconomic inequality, the folk ideal did nothing to change the impression of Spanish-speaking farmers and herders as figures of a backward social class. Indeed, by cloaking paisano culture in the trappings of Spanish heritage, it made the onetime stain of backwardness seem all the more appropriate to Santa Fe and its environs. If Anglo newcomers sometimes doubted the wisdom of living in a town of unschooled paisanos and crumbling adobes, the sights and sounds of a “Spanish culture” eased their adjustment to the neighborhood. The once-a-year Santa Fe Fiesta did not offer the most complete view of the upper Rio Grande’s paisanos, of course. Nor did it do much to change their lives. In the late twenties, however, just as the new Fiesta was emerging, a number of its enthusiasts aimed to spread the gospel of a Spanish folk culture back to the folk themselves. According to Anglo and Hispano admirers, the villagers were going astray. Seduced by the sirens of mass production and mass consumption, they risked losing their cultural vitality. To forestall that disaster, the admirers mounted a campaign to revive and restore the village’s artistic expressions, its socalled Spanish colonial arts. Regarded as the distilled essence of paisano life, the Spanish arts were considered the best hope of insulating it from America’s “machine civilization.”

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chapter 5

The Revival of Spanish Colonial Arts, 1924 –1936 [T]he people were taught by our Anglo Civilization . . . that they should desire and possess the things that were offered them by mail-order houses and local dealers. Through this feeling of so-called progress the people ceased to appreciate and produce the beautiful and practical furniture that had heretofore been, one might say, a vital part of their existence. Nina Otero-Warren, A. M. Bergere Family Papers, ca. 1932

It is in their blood, and they cannot escape their heritage. Cyrus McCormick, Jr., Austin Papers, 1931

In 1936 Nina Otero-Warren published Old Spain in Our Southwest, a poetic portrait of the Rio Arriba’s Hispano villagers. Along with its idyllic descriptions of the area, the book also said much about its author’s life. Otero-Warren worked as a federal Indian agent and held local office, but she was primarily an educator, one who spent considerable time trying to bring Hispano culture into New Mexico’s public schools. She wrote the book in large part to acquaint young readers with the lore of Spanish-speaking villagers, particularly the songs and stories that rarely appeared in print. Less directly but with equal force, she wrote it to defend her own social position against the encroachment of Anglo America. Known in New Mexico, in the words of the Hispano historian Benjamin Read, as “a lineal descendant of two of the most illustrious families from Old Spain,” Otero-Warren recognized that the influence 158

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of the upper Rio Grande’s Hispano elite was rapidly waning. The realization encouraged her, a self-proclaimed leader of los paisanos, to revive “Old Spain” in the humble villages of the Rio Arriba. Although she enjoyed the benefits of twentieth-century America, including the right to vote and run for office, she depicted the villagers as little changed from eighteenth-century settlers. With automobiles now zooming along state highways, los paisanos appeared in her book as a simple and passive people who followed the nourishing patterns of tradition and the gentle guidance of the village patrón. “The Spanish descendant of the Conquistadores may be poor,” she wrote, “but he takes his place in life with a noble bearing, for he can never forget that he is a descendant of the Conquerors.” 1 Reviewers locally and nationally praised the book. They were especially taken by the sketch of a dignified people enriched by Spanish tradition. Their reaction is not surprising, for as the young folklorist Arthur Campa noted in a lonely critical review, the Southwest was abuzz in 1936 with romantic talk of “Spanish heritage” and “Spanish character.” 2 By the mid-thirties the same modernist-inspired rhetoric that surfaced at the Santa Fe Fiesta had recast “Mexicans” throughout the Rio Arriba as a distinctive folk culture, the living embodiment of New Mexico’s Spanish colonial past. As is often the case with romantic portrayals, this one left out the more practical details of the villagers’ lives, not least of which was their ongoing struggle to survive. Even before the onset of the Great Depression, farmers and sheepherders had faced an agricultural disaster. No longer able to find open pastures north and east of the upper Rio Grande watershed, beset by drought and recession, deprived of crucial grazing areas, they watched their families grow and their incomes shrink. A second oversight involved the villagers’ apparent folk character. Despite their primitive appearance, they were never as isolated from the twentieth century as their admirers imagined. After World War I, radios, appliances, and mail-order catalogs—the objects and emblems of modern times—made steady progress into picturesque adobe settlements. Otero-Warren was not blind to either development. Indeed, as much as her lyrical book spoke of happier times, it was inspired by a perception of impending crisis. In her mind, economic and cultural change were two sides of a difficult question: how might los paisanos preserve their way of life amid the inevitable economic changes occurring in the Rio Arriba? It was a question without a good solution. The state of New Mexico had neither the resources nor the will to save the village in its

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turn-of-the-century form. The federal government, to its credit, sponsored numerous studies of the Rio Arriba in the 1930s, but soil experts, economists, and sociologists were always better at identifying shortcomings, such as overgrazing and malnutrition, than at recommending a practical remedy. In the 1940s many of the younger villagers came up with their own answer. By joining the armed forces or taking up wartime jobs in Albuquerque and California, they simply left their troubles behind. Yet by that point, two decades after it began to take shape, the image of the villager as bearer of a colonial past was already fixed in the region’s public imagination. Otero-Warren’s book, although at odds with the realities of its time, was thus received as a work of penetrating insight. The emergence of the colonial image of the villagers is attributable in no small part to their hand-fashioned art. At the very moment that a “Spanish culture” was flowering at the Fiesta, a number of influential Santa Fe residents believed the best remedy for the Rio Arriba was a renaissance of “Spanish colonial” craftsmanship. Entranced by carved santos, woven blankets, embroidered bedspreads, and rough-hewn furniture, arts enthusiasts collected objects and promoted handcraft techniques. Their campaign, pursued, according to one observer, with “some of the fire of an old-fashioned Methodist revival,” reflected the nearmagical possibilities for social transformation associated with handmade arts. Although less interested initially in economic than cultural reform, the art enthusiasts decided by the early 1930s that the two concerns could be addressed in tandem. Through sales of the Spanish arts, the thinking went, villagers could supplement their meager incomes. And in crafting the objects, they could rediscover forms of expression that were central to their very nature.3 The hope centered on the vision of a uniquely Spanish colonial art, a form of expression modified by the New Mexico frontier yet rooted in a distant Iberian past. The celebrated Spanish character of the arts presented a number of advantages. It enabled enthusiasts to define the “crafts” of wood carving and weaving as high arts. The cachet of “Spanish colonial arts,” in turn, attracted a following of writers, philanthropists, and tourists in numbers that “Mexican crafts” could not have matched. A Spanish colonial character likewise suggested possibilities of cultural rebirth. How could wayward villagers better fortify their souls than to return to the artistic expressions of their eighteenth-century ancestors? In rediscovering a Spanish colonial essence, the villagers would find the wherewithal to live dignified if impecunious lives, free of bale-

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ful modern influences. Finally, a Spanish character suited the interests of their Hispano and Anglo supporters. As at the Fiesta, art enthusiasts like Nina Otero-Warren enjoyed the role of cultural patrona, the leader of a people whose outward appearance belied artistic genius. Anglo admirers likewise enjoyed the esteem they earned from awakening a “dormant” Spanish culture. The only people not served well by the Spanish arts revival were the villagers themselves. Portrayals of preindustrial craftspeople did not cause economic misery, but they did little to ameliorate and much to rationalize it. The emphasis on the village arts, that is, softened and even justified the hard edges of material privation. It did so by casting the paisano artist as a symbol of resistance to America’s “machine civilization.” Those outside the village—art enthusiasts in Santa Fe, tourists, Americans at large—were of course far too reliant on mass production and consumption to join the fight. As they drove automobiles and placed telephone calls, the Spanish colonial artist remained a child of the past, pure enough in tradition to fight “the machine” yet sufficiently subordinate, racially and materially, not to matter. In that sense, images from the arts revival complemented those at the Fiesta. If the Fiesta presented los paisanos as a premodern folk culture, the arts revival demonstrated why that culture had to remain marginal to modern New Mexico.

The Hispano Village, Imagined and Lived Unlike architectural changes of the 1910s, and far more than the Fiesta of the late 1920s, the arts revival reintroduced the Rio Arriba’s Hispano villages. To Anglo merchants of growing railroad towns, and to Spanishspeaking patrones of the Rio Abajo, none of the sixty to seventy upriver communities—places like Cundiyo and Truchas, Cañones and Los Ojos, Abiquiu and Trampas—had ever merited much interest. In 1920 they typically consisted of adobe houses, a few dirt roads, a nondescript store or two, and a rather modest Catholic church. Situated alongside small streams, the tributaries of the Rio Grande, each hamlet sat close by long, thin farming plots planted with corn, beans, wheat, and chile. Exploiting the narrow floodplains of the Rio Arriba’s mountainous terrain, the plots stretched across nearly every square foot of irrigable soil. Time and again, however, the heroic attempt to turn a profit was fruitless. To feed their families, fathers and brothers ordinarily ranged beyond their unproductive fields, either to graze sheep in higher pastures or to earn

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wages in the coal mines and beet fields of Wyoming and Colorado. Whether they traded in crops, wool, or their own labor, the villagers inevitably bargained from a weak position. If they were not egregiously mistreated by Hispano patrones and Anglo foremen, their presence as simple beasts of burden was taken for granted. The turn-of-the-century sheep rancher Frank Bond, for example, remembered his partideros as a loyal and undemanding people who “confined themselves to the barest necessities.” In the eyes of business owners like Bond, the quiet, downtrodden villagers perfectly suited the humble towns in which they lived.4 In about 1920 the long-neglected Rio Arriba began to attract attention. With a population roughly 80 percent Hispano, the rural area became an object of the postwar fascination with American folk cultures.5 Aided by sturdier automobiles and better roads, the pursuit of the folk turned towns such as Truchas and Abiquiu into intriguing places to see and photograph. As was true when Indian tourism took off at 1900, no entity was better situated to present the sites than the Santa Fe Railway. Not long after the turn of the century, the railroad recognized that the tourists’ experience of Indians at trackside hotels would always have a derivative and contrived flavor. Even under the careful supervision of the adjunct Fred Harvey Company, which insisted on the display of “authentic” tools, clothes, jewelry, and pottery in its trackside stores, Navajo weavers and Pueblo potters remained within shouting distance of the trains. In 1926, to provide close-up views of actual Indian villages, the company initiated its Indian Detours. Although Indian settlements like San Ildefonso and Santo Domingo were always the outfit’s principal destinations, the so-called Harveycars also made occasional stops in Hispano villages such as Chimayo and Truchas. Soon the paisano, no less than the Pueblo, was a figure on display. As drivers positioned their Packards so as to afford tourists the most picturesque views of the village, well-versed tour guides interpreted what they saw. One thing the guides were quick to note was that the villagers were not Mexicans, as tourists might suppose, but descendants of Spanish colonists. “No visitor to the Southwest should overlook the life of the Spanish people,” said one promotional booklet. “In towns like Tome, Chimayo, and Placitas, where the effects of time and Yankee civilization have scarcely been felt, the life of these people goes on much as it did a century ago.” 6 Indian Detours inaugurated the era of automobile tourism in New Mexico, an era that promised to bring people and profits to spots bypassed by the railroad. Out-of-the-way Anglo settlements lying near Indian pueblos as well as Hispano villages stood to gain handsomely

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from the crisscrossing traffic. The commercial potential immediately drew the interest of state and city officials. The Albuquerque Journal heralded the Detours as the “best piece of good news the state has had since oil was found.” In advertising alone, the newspaper went on, “[l]iterally hundreds of thousands of dollars will be expended . . . to make the Southwest known to the rest of the world.” The possibilities also seized the imagination of the Santa Fe Chamber of Commerce. With business in the capital city poised to gain from increased traffic to the Rio Arriba, the chamber called on the state to “sell to the tourist world the ‘paradise of northern New Mexico.’” 7 State officials responded by improving roads and printing articles that told visitors where they led. The publication of choice was New Mexico, a magazine that started in 1923 as a journal of the State Highway Department but was turned by 1931 into a full-color guide. Its raison d’être was explained in the 1930 article, “Why Tourists?” Invoking the ever-shining example of California, the article stressed that tourism, profitable in its own right, would also enlarge the state’s population and foster broader economic development.8 The upper Rio Grande’s paisanos were not New Mexico’s only attraction, of course, but their dispersed settlements promised to spread sales of gasoline, provisions, and souvenirs across a wide area. The magazine accordingly described the customs and sites a visitor might anticipate. To add a flavor of authenticity, it also published accounts by Hispanos themselves, which were sometimes introduced by notes such as the following: “This article, written by a Spanish-American youth of the village of Trampas, has not been materially edited, the intention being to show the careful attention to detail and simplicity of expression characteristic of the Spanish-Americans.” 9 The invitation to identify the Rio Arriba village as a Spanish colonial refuge was quite new. After 1880, when the railroad’s arrival opened New Mexico to practical excursions, travel-related literature largely overlooked los paisanos. Portrayed at times as courteous and hospitable, they mostly languished in the shadows of mission churches and Indian pueblos, or else appeared as mere curiosities, the strange bearers of poverty, idleness, and ignorance.10 By the late twenties and early thirties, the villagers were still materially poor, yet had grown spiritually wealthy. As descendants of the first settlers, they were guided as if by instinct through the activities of daily life, “true to the rule and rote of five centuries past,” oblivious to concerns of the twentieth century. “Time has passed these people by,” one writer observed of the residents of Cordova. “They live today in their ancestral homes in the manner

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their ancestors taught them to live; the manner that prevailed during the reign of the sixteenth century Spanish viceroys.” In “Old Spain in New Mexico,” a promotional article written for the Santa Fe Railway, the poet Alice Corbin spoke of “arrested time” and identified the mood in the village as medieval.11 That other-worldly perception only sharpened as the depression deepened. Downplaying the Rio Arriba’s own economic difficulties, articles in New Mexico presented the traditioninfused village as a sanctuary from the spiritual torpor pervading industrial America. Income and wealth were beside the point.12 Evidently the writers did not understand the extent to which Hispano families depended on cash earned outside the Rio Arriba. For upriver dwellers, as for their ancestors, the land’s meager offerings compelled constant movement. In the late eighteenth and nineteenth century, depleted soil and denuded hillsides forced young men and women to look north and east for new fields and pastures. Even villagers who did not relocate were constantly on the move, hunting buffalo, grazing sheep, and exchanging goods.13 After 1880 or so the villagers’ migrations took on a different character. Finding themselves increasingly hemmed in by Anglo cattle ranchers, as well as homesteaders and speculators, young men began leaving their villagers on a seasonal basis for wage-paying jobs. In Colorado and points still farther north, they cut timber, laid railroad ties, mined coal, and cultivated sugar beets. By the 1920s about one male member of every household, a total of perhaps ten thousand men, left each spring to earn $40 to $100 per month. Sometimes whole families relocated, with wives and sisters working as cooks, servants, and laundresses. Over time the migrations extended the villagers’ cultural influence to points far beyond the Rio Arriba, helping to build the Spanish-speaking presence in places like Pueblo and Denver. Yet neither seasonal nor permanent migration came easily. As the folklorist Reyes Martínez recalled, departures were always tearful affairs. Gathering at the village store, families said sad good-byes to their heavily laden men as they trudged off toward the railroad stop. If some workers looked forward to getting away and earning steady pay, most departed with stoic resignation, reluctant to leave home but certain they could not otherwise feed and shelter their families.14 Financial need in the village had several sources. First and foremost was a loss of land. As Anglo speculators and livestock companies gained control of land grants, the federal government reserved millions of unconfirmed acres for homesteaders or forest reserves (today’s national forests). Expanses of timber and meadows formerly claimed or used by

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the villagers were increasingly taken out of their hands. Taxation compounded the problem. New Mexico’s large blocks of federally owned property conspired with the state’s small industrial base to shift tax liabilities onto small farmers. Meanwhile, the birth of each child not only increased a family’s burdens; it also promised to subdivide family property. Because all children, male and female, inherited an equal share of irrigable land, small plots were sliced into ever narrower strips, which were in turn prone to erosion and depleted soils. One scholar has suggested that even without the loss of ancestral lands, the mountainous Rio Arriba was simply too crowded by 1900 to sustain an adequate standard of living. Whether or not that was so, it is clear that even those fortunate families with undisputed title to small farming lots often labored on a land base insufficient for its immediate needs, much less for the future of its children.15 A broader problem was the failure of villagers to keep pace with the regional twentieth-century economy. For years after 1850, villagers made money by trading sheep, chile, beans, and hand-fashioned goods with Anglo soldiers and merchants. Seventy-five years later such items still found buyers, but they could not compete with agricultural produce and machine-made articles now shipped into the state by truck and railroad. Village products were increasingly relegated to peripheral markets, such as roadside stands, and villagers looked to fill economic niches, supplying larger communities such items as firewood and alcohol.16 Indeed, the sale of moonshine during Prohibition was far and away the most lucrative paisano enterprise. During the late 1920s, for example, José Candelaria sold corn whiskey to residents of Albuquerque for $12 a gallon, or $1 for a full Coke bottle. In 1990 the eighty-fiveyear-old Candelaria was uncertain if he ever attended school but did know that his labors began at age eight, when he started his career as a herder, timber cutter, and, eventually, firewood hauler. That final job brought in only $5 per week, but it enabled him to hide his illegal cargo from highway patrols beneath loads of cut wood. For villagers such as Candelaria, the job of running whiskey to the homes of Albuquerque or Santa Fe was nothing less than a godsend.17 Few of Candelaria’s neighbors fared as well. In 1930 the average family of Hispano farmers had only six acres under cultivation. Crops yielded about $100 per year, an amount insufficient for basic subsistence. With the worsening of the depression, sales of sheep and wool products fell off dramatically, and income from outside wage work was sharply reduced. In 1935 less than two thousand people found work outside the

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state; two years later seasonal earnings for all migrant laborers had declined from their 1930 level by 80 percent.18 The shrinkage of already meager incomes was felt throughout the villagers’ lives. A 1935 study of Truchas measured how much the stunningly beautiful mountain village, set high against snowcapped peaks, belied its residents’ daily struggle. Living in houses that averaged fewer than three rooms, the town’s one thousand residents who still owned property (fifty-four families did not) farmed on plots of less than four acres. With only one reliable well in the village, most used the main irrigation ditch for drinking and washing. Sickened by typhoid, which ran rampant across northern New Mexico during the decade, residents were forced to travel more than thirty miles for medical attention. Nor did their diets do them much good. Because milk and beans were scarce, they lived mostly on white flour, which left children chronically underweight. A study of villagers in Taos County estimated that their daily caloric intake provided only enough energy for four to five hours of physical labor.19 The desperate conditions ensured the steadfast presence of death in the Rio Arriba. Throughout the 1930s, New Mexico’s infant mortality rate was the highest in the United States. Wherever Hispanos accounted for at least half a county’s total population, nearly three of every twenty infants died. The overall death rate in the state between 1921 and 1938, 16.2 per 1,000 people, also led the nation. In Taos County, where deprivations were arguably the most acute, one of every three children died before reaching adulthood. The situation, as one villager put it simply, “was very, very bad.” 20

Spanish Colonial Craftsmanship Hitting rock bottom in the early thirties, village economies cried out for government assistance. Although the fiscally conservative state of New Mexico had little help to offer, federal agencies attacked low incomes, poor health, and depleted natural resources with a spate of studies and relief projects known today as the “Hispanic New Deal.” The concern with villagers’ material deprivation was shared even by Santa Fe’s highminded admirers of “Spanish culture,” most of whom were little accustomed to matters of sanitation and soil erosion. A case in point is that of publisher and part-time Rio Arriba resident Cyrus McCormick, Jr. The wealthy son of the Chicago industrialist, McCormick set aside his fascination with Hispano art in 1933 to bring jobs to the northern vil-

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lages. Recognizing the possibilities of employing numerous men on road-building projects, he appealed repeatedly to the Public Works Administration for special construction funds. As magazine articles continued to paint a romantic portrait of the Rio Arriba, McCormick spoke of the “direst need of jobs and . . . bare necessities” among the “Spanish-American population.” 21 Yet McCormick’s concern with jobs and roads was something new. Only a few years earlier, he had identified a different kind of crisis, one less about food or shelter than artistic expression. The problem was the apparent neglect of craftsmanship. Handcrafted tools, hand-woven clothing, carved tables, chests, and religious objects all seemed to be losing ground to factory-produced articles. To saddened onlookers, the issue was more than a loss of aesthetic richness; it was at once symptom and cause of what Mary Austin called a “shattered culture.” In other words, as it did away with picturesque artistry, the consumption of mass-produced objects also put an end to basic folk expressions, thereby sapping the villagers’ cultural vitality. McCormick and Austin responded by insulating los paisanos from the outside world. Rather than find ways to connect the village to a network of highways, they sought to separate and protect it and to restore in its residents the artistic vision of Spanish colonial ancestors.22 Santa Fe’s recognized authority on that vision was Frank Applegate, a nationally known expert on ceramic pottery. Applegate moved to Santa Fe somewhat accidentally in August 1921, having taken leave from his teaching position at the prominent Trenton School of Industrial Arts. Touring the United States by automobile, the New Jersey sculptor planned a brief stay. But like so many sojourning artists, he was captivated by the local scene. Drawn immediately to village santos, both retablos (painted wood tablets) and hand-carved bultos (statues), Applegate soon became interested in the broader field of Hispano manual arts. As he and his wife visited the Rio Arriba villages, they were stunned to find handmade furniture sitting idly in dark storage rooms or holding animal feed. At once dismayed and excited, Applegate dedicated himself to enlightening his Anglo and Hispano neighbors about the history of Hispano craftsmanship.23 That history, he told a Santa Fe audience in 1930, is a tale of medieval inheritance, colonial flowering, and territorial decline. To find the true essence of village craftsmanship, he argued, one must look back to the folk art of medieval Spain. Transplanted to New Mexico in the seventeenth century, the folk tradition took root in the Rio Arriba. Shaped by the area’s secluded mountain en-

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vironment, as well as Indian influences, it grew in isolation from the baroque and rococo styles that spread throughout Spain and her colonies. Now, in 1930, there was still no purer strain of Spanish folk art than that found in northern New Mexico. Sadly, Applegate went on, exposure to Anglo influences since the mid-nineteenth century had caused Spanish craftsmanship to wither. More than actual factory-made goods, which steadily rendered handcrafted objects obsolete, it was a pervasive ethos of mass production and mass consumption, the credo of what Applegate called “our machine-made civilization,” that turned villagers away from the arts of weaving, carving, building, and painting. Even the village schools, he concluded with wistful irony, “have shown the younger generation how much superior a colored crayon drawing of an Easter egg is to the primitive art of their forefathers.” 24 It is noteworthy that Applegate spoke of “reviving” Spanish colonial craftsmanship. That term may in fact misconstrue what he and his colleagues were up to. For one thing, scholars have argued that the Santa Fe enthusiasts exaggerated the decline of manual craftsmanship, in part to dramatize their own heroism in rescuing it.25 The arrival of Anglos no doubt marked a turning point for village economies, but it was not an unmitigated disaster. Metal cans brought by the newcomers reinvigorated local tinwork, and Anglo tourists created a new market for woven blankets. José Dolores López, a Cordova wood-carver, Nicacio Ortega, a Chimayo weaver, and Antonio Luna, a Taos silversmith, all kept up a steady pace of work between 1900 and 1920.26 Another problem with Applegate’s account involved the crafts’ evolution. In stressing Spanish origins, he and his colleagues tended to slight their full range of artistic influences. Any technique imported from peninsular Spain was inevitably altered during its slow journey northward through Mexico. And colonial New Mexico was a crossroads of artistic currents, some continuing to flow from Mexico, others emanating from local Indian tribes, still others coursing back and forth among the commercial elite, the Catholic Church, lay religious fraternities, and the folk themselves.27 Although Applegate readily discussed the “influence of Indian blood” in a 1931 article published in the Survey, his emphasis always lay on a Spanish essence. Particularly to a local Santa Fe audience, which may have prompted a more Hispano-centric interpretation, he presented the Rio Arriba less as a meeting ground of eclectic influences than as an artistic refuge, a setting that was isolated enough to preserve a single tradition. Finally, Applegate’s account did not describe how he and other art admirers attempted to suppress unwelcome influences.

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“Reviving” Spanish colonial craftsmanship in the 1920s meant discouraging innovation and subduing techniques that did not suit preferred notions of authenticity. In short, Applegate’s notion of Spanish colonial arts was premised on a highly selective and stylized story of efflorescence and decline.28 That story held some basic truths, however. Spanish settlers had led relatively secluded lives. They lacked the tools and expertise to craft finely finished objects and the resources to acquire the more elaborate designs coming north from Mexico. In their woodwork, for example, they used rough-hewn panels and posts, squared-off pegs and chiseled holes, and glue from animal hides to fashion irregular floor chests and cabinets. The same primitive quality inhered in locally made textiles. Initially dependent on cotton cloth supplied by Pueblo Indians, colonists eventually built looms for weaving wool and derived dyes from local plants. For each craft, local materials, proportions, and embellishments lent an appearance distinctive to the Rio Arriba.29 Applegate was also correct in highlighting the changes wrought by Anglo intruders. After 1821, to save time and energy, villagers began to acquire materials brought over the Santa Fe Trail. Nails, milled lumber, metal hinges, and corrugated tin altered the construction of homes and furniture. Because mass-produced goods were often cheaper and lighter than handmade objects—by 1855 imported mahogany furniture cost less than handcrafted pine—Hispanos discarded painstaking methods of carving and weaving. With the cash they earned selling produce and wood, they bought metal beds, tin trunks, and factory-made furniture. A similar process took place in textile production. Although a few artisans turned out hand-woven blankets and colcha embroidery into the twentieth century, the arrival of bright, factory-dyed yarns altered the appearance of wool textiles, just as the availability of cheap, ready-made clothing changed habits of dressing. Increasingly, paisanos put on store-bought overalls and turned out blankets and serapes for a growing tourist market.30 Particularly dismaying to Applegate was the dwindling number of santeros, the creators of painted and carved religious images. The santero had risen to prominence late in the eighteenth century, when the withdrawal of Franciscan priests from New Mexico left an expanding Hispano population with few santos. In villages throughout the upper Rio Grande, local craftmakers stepped into the void, carving cottonwood figures and painting likenesses on pine tablets. Though the work was often commissioned by patrons, it bore what Applegate and others

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interpreted as a primitive spiritual aesthetic reminiscent of Romanesque Spain. In place of elaborate baroque styles, santeros composed twodimensional portraits and carved elongated, abstract figures with large heads and detached, often melancholy expressions. All such images stood at the very center of village life. Placing the santos in churches, homes, and Penitente moradas (chapels), villagers spoke to and prayed with them each day. After 1850, however, American and European clergymen replaced “barbarous” hand-fashioned santos with mass-produced plaster representations and colorful Currier and Ives prints. Significantly less expensive than the painstakingly crafted santos, the new images were adopted by rich and poor alike, and the santero consequently lost his livelihood. By century’s end only a few continued to practice their craft.31 Art enthusiasts interpreted the changes as moments of cultural decline because they saw them through a powerful ideological lens. When Applegate spoke of a “machine-made civilization,” he invoked the metaphor lying at the heart of a broad-based critique of modern America in the twenties and thirties. One target of Edward Sapir’s abstract assessment of America’s “mechanistic” culture was “the great cultural fallacy of industrialism”: in bringing machines under human control, Sapir wrote, the industrial order “has not known how to avoid the harnessing of the majority of mankind to its machines.” Critics fleshed out that claim by pointing to its practical consequences. Even as prominent figures such as Henry Ford and historian Charles Beard heralded the liberating potential of production, the critics saw an advanced form of slavery. Mechanization did not just indenture workers to the drudgery of assembly lines, it changed them. Turning out a commodity they could neither possess nor know as their own, it alienated them from their own labor. Subordinating them to a process over which they had little control, it transformed them into interchangeable parts. Nor was the damage confined to the factory. In devaluing craftsmanship, machine production severed the individual’s link to the social organism, thereby creating an atomistic society. And in cheapening the objects of labor, the machine rendered quality and taste obsolete, thereby reducing the discriminating buyer to a mass consumer. Indeed, the consequences of “the machine” redounded throughout American life. It “standardized” idiosyncratic souls, locking them into patterns of producing and consuming that left no place for Homo faber. 32 Seeking a way out, some critics followed a path to the less industrialized areas of the American Southwest and Mexico. Like the anthro-

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pologists Benedict and Redfield, the amateur ethnographers Waldo Frank and Stuart Chase found inspiration by heading south and southwest. Yet as Applegate and Austin could well attest, “the machine” had already made inroads into the upper Rio Grande. If New Mexico lacked the large factories of urban America, factory-made goods nonetheless appeared in the Rio Arriba villages with alarming regularity. The spread of the objects was often blamed on an altogether mundane fixture of rural America: the mail order catalog. Because it facilitated the acquisition of mass-produced goods, it came to symbolize the decline of village craftsmanship. Likewise, critics of “the machine” deplored the assault of the mass media. As billboards appeared on once-empty stretches of road, the “blare of radios and talkies” exposed the Rio Arriba to the standardizing banter of urban entertainment. No wonder Mary Austin and Frank Applegate declared that the Spanish arts “must be kept, if for nothing else, as a defense against the pressure of the modern machine.” 33 Precisely how Hispano villagers felt about the matter is difficult to gauge. One must assume that paisanos welcomed the conveniences of factory-made clothing, tools, and appliances. Yet at least some villagers reacted with alarm. They recognized that as more neighbors earned cash wages and bought new products, fewer took part in the shared work of harvesting crops and replastering houses. Communal religious observances likewise lost participants. In the 1930s residents of Placitas recalled the “Golden Age” of the 1880s, when their relatives earned hard cash at a local mine. But they also remembered the passing of the Valerium, a Christmas Eve feast in which all residents of the village gathered around small outdoor fires to sing Christmas carols. The last Valerium in Placitas took place in 1885.34 The blame for such changes was often laid at the feet of young women. As their husbands and brothers left the village periodically to look for work, women earned small amounts of cash closer to home, often by cleaning houses or clerking in shops. The new freedom made possible behaviors their elders considered downright impudent. Smoking, wearing makeup, and leaving the house alone to socialize provoked consternation, as did the new objects they brought back. Like false idols, “milk in the can,” “sliced bread,” “a good car,” “fine hats,” and “short dresses” seemed to lure women away from the purifying labor of the traditional home and bring the entire family that much closer to ruin.35 But women were only part of the story. New forms of technology, particularly the railroad and the automobile, symbolized an era whose excitement and energy arrived with a

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twinge of loss. Among the more popular poems in northern New Mexico was a verse addressed to “Don Simón,” a poet who once celebrated the virtues of Spanish colonial society. By the beginning of the twentieth century, New Mexican bards referred to “Don Simón” in verses expressing how much times had changed, always for the worse. One anonymous poet reflected thus: In the old days we traveled in wagons, In buckboards and coaches, with great elan, Today they travel behind swift engines What times these are, Señor Don Simón! 36

Anxieties about change in the Rio Arriba created an opening for the arts revival. Expressions of loss, although not shared by all paisanos, helped to justify the ideal of the preindustrial village. Not that the art enthusiasts needed much help. Confident of the fit between handcrafts and the Rio Arriba villager, they were equally sure of the misfit between the villager and city life. Paisanos, they believed, were simply out of place in a modern industrial economy. Regarded, like ethnic Mexicans throughout the Southwest, as lacking higher industrial capabilities, they also stood apart from the Mexican masses by virtue of their ascribed Spanish colonial inheritance. The colonial legacy, that is, seemed to compensate paisanos for their privations and soften their backward image. It enabled the art enthusiasts, in all good conscience, to extol primitive lives while they themselves enjoyed every convenience of the “machine age.” As longtime Santa Fe resident Ruth Laughlin Barker put it, “[T]he Spanish-Americans are essentially a hand-craft people,” whose wealth of tradition and simple needs suited a life of material scarcity. “Los pobres of New Mexico,” she concluded, “are the luckiest poor people in America, if not in the world.” 37

The Spanish Colonial Arts Society The organizational basis of the craft revival was the Spanish Colonial Arts Society, a group organized in 1925 by a mostly Anglo group of artists, writers, and philanthropists. Among its initial members were Nina Otero-Warren; Alice Corbin Henderson; the artists Sheldon Parsons, Andrew Dasburg, Gerald Cassidy, and Kenneth Chapman; and, in philanthropic roles, Bronson Cutting, Leonora Curtain, Margretta Dietrich, and Mary Cabot Wheelwright.38 The society’s principal benefactor was Cyrus McCormick, Jr. His contributions enabled the orga-

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nization to stage exhibitions, create a permanent art collection (valued at $4,000 in 1929), award prize money, set up a market, and promote desirable techniques in outlying villages. To begin the job of transforming “native” curios into highly valued objects, the society awarded prizes to works exhibited at the annual Fiesta. In 1927 tinsmith Juan García of San Miguel, cabinet maker Encarnación García of Cow Springs, weaver Petrita Quintana of Peñasco, wood-carver José Dolores López of Cordova, and santero Celso Gallegos of Agua Fria brought their work to Santa Fe for the contribution. Of all the artists, Gallegos was the probably most celebrated. The $60 he received in 1926 was his first of several prizes, and his work was subsequently shown in Chicago. Himself a grandson of a santero, the elderly, penniless, and infirm Agua Fria carver seemed to embody the society’s desire, expressed in the words of Mary Austin, “to rescue from oblivion all talent and inherited craft stored up in our Spanish people.” 39 Austin and Applegate were the society’s most active and inspired participants. Their interests and styles were complementary. A reserved man, Applegate served as the revival’s art expert. He began collecting objects immediately after arriving in Santa Fe in 1921 and soon became versed in minute details of craftsmanship. Austin was the evangelist. A lyrical writer and aggressive promoter, often of her own talents, Austin was less interested in the specific details of village crafts than in their significance as totems of the folk spirit. Although she did not settle permanently in New Mexico until 1925, she first became acquainted with Hispano villagers in 1919 while studying rural New Mexico under the Carnegie Foundation’s Study of the Methods of Americanization. Mindful of the relative anonymity of los paisanos, the study’s supervisor, University of Chicago sociologist Robert Park, advised Austin to “[p]ut the emphasis upon the Spanish-Americans rather than the indians [sic].” The reports she produced stand out in two ways. One was her interpretation of the villagers’ “economic maladjustment.” On the basis of a single encounter, she confidently concluded that the Hispano farmer was really a “handcraftsman” whose talents were wasted in the fields. Second, she referred to her subjects, in keeping with the uncertain nomenclature of the period, as “Mexicans.” Six years later, when the society was founded, the place of “handcrafts” had only risen in her estimation, and “the misleading term ‘Mexicans’” had been dropped. The villagers had become “Spanish Colonials.” 40 Although burdened by anxieties of the “machine age,” Austin and Applegate formed the society in direct response to the pressures and opportunities of a budding tourist trade in Hispano crafts. As the two en-

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thusiasts watched the “machine” advance into the Rio Arriba, they also noticed that impoverished villagers were selling off artifacts to curio dealers at alarming rates. By the mid-twenties a santo could fetch as much as $300 from an eastern collector.41 Even worse was the impact of middle-class tourists. To meet the demand for souvenir crafts, dealers began to peddle cheap imitations, thereby threatening to undermine recognized standards of craftsmanship. Yet tourists were also integral to the revival of Spanish arts. Without visitors willing to buy wooden and woven goods, paisano artists would have no reliable market and hence no incentive to adopt the society’s preferred craft techniques. Dependent on commerce, the society walked a fine line between craftsmanship and commercialization. To promote sales, art enthusiasts proclaimed the gospel of Spanish colonial art in local and national publications. To encourage buyers to cultivate a taste for the authentic collectible, the society set standards for what was collected, produced, and sold.42 The enthusiasts’ resolve was no doubt strengthened by parallel activities in the field of Indian arts. Just as many tourists encountered the Rio Arriba village on an Indian Detour, a number of the Spanish art collectors found their calling after being drawn to Pueblo pottery or Navajo blankets. Society members Kenneth Chapman and Mary Cabot Wheelwright, for example, were among the organizers of the Southwest Indian Fair in 1922, the exhibition and craft market held at the Fiesta. Although Austin directed almost all of her attention after 1929 to Spanish colonial arts, she and Applegate remained trustees of the Indian Arts Fund, an endowment established in 1925 to collect pottery and encourage connoisseurship.43 Nor was Austin’s and Applegate’s anxiety over the “machine age” unlike the impulses of primitivism that fueled the Anglo fascination with southwestern Indian tribes.44 Whether beguiled by Hispanos or Indians, Anglos gravitated toward a people who appeared to stand outside the realm of industrial capitalism. As makers of ceramic pots or wooden santos, Indians and Hispano villagers shared a mythic status because they reproduced the totemic objects of worlds long lost. Yet one should not forget the wall that stood between those worlds. Indian and Hispano arts were exhibited and sold separately precisely because they represented distinct aspirations. In Anglo eyes the virtuoso work of the Indian potter María Martínez was the utopian counterpart to the products of Western civilization. It embodied an other-worldly unity of industry, art, and religion that Anglos could never achieve. Hispano arts, the offspring of racial mixing, never attained such exotic purity. They were, however, closer to home. In the santos of

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men like Celso Gallegos and Patrocino Barela, art enthusiasts discovered a preindustrial genius that was not confined to the alien Indian pueblo. On the contrary, it seemed to pervade the upper Rio Grande landscape, turning up in places familiar yet long overlooked.45 One of those places was Chimayo. Nestled in a valley below the high village of Truchas, about thirty miles north of Santa Fe, Chimayo had long been known to Anglo soldiers and merchants for its apples and chile. Local Hispanos also enjoyed the town’s produce, but they associated Chimayo primarily with a humble chapel, El Santuario del Señor de Esquípula. Known as El Santuario, the structure was finished in 1816 by Bernardo Abeyta, a wealthy trader who, according to legend, built it to thank San Esquípula for curing him of his infirmities. El Santuario soon became a shrine for Catholic pilgrims, many of whom sought relief from physical suffering in its reputedly miraculous soil. In the late 1920s the chapel fell victim to economic hard times. The building’s owners, Abeyta’s granddaughter among them, began to sell off its handcarved santos and wooden furnishings. Art enthusiasts in Santa Fe were shocked. Dana Johnson promptly called on the public to prevent the “Lourdes of America” from being wholly despoiled and “its sacred relics peddled to curio dealers.” 46 Residents of Chimayo were also dismayed, and some of them retrieved the Santuario’s sacred objects from stores in Santa Fe. Nonetheless, Frank Applegate feared that the “Mexican who owns it” would soon dispose of the entire building. Despite a publicly stated desire to preserve the Santuario “as an inalienable possession for the descendants of the Spanish pioneers,” Applegate did not trust the motives or taste of the villagers. “Of course it is unsafe as long as it is in Native hands,” he wrote Mary Austin. “They are likely any time to go on a restoring Jamboree and ruin it, as they almost did when the[y] put on modern towers and a tin roof a few years ago.” The difficult situation was resolved only after Austin prevailed on an anonymous Catholic benefactor to buy the chapel and donate it to the archdiocese. Negotiations were kept quiet so that the “natives would not get too excited” and drive up the price.47 As it raised the society’s profile, the Santuario project also exposed the group’s contradictory aims. The arts revival was premised on the notion of a distinctive paisano gift: only the villagers could express an authentic colonial inheritance. Yet it was the society that tried to shape the course of artistic expression. It rarely trusted the villagers’ fortitude to preserve existing objects or their ability to create “authentic” new ones. One problem involved buying and selling works of historic value.

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Applegate encouraged villagers to sell artifacts to the society, which ran a small store, the Spanish Arts, to market pieces to the general public. Applegate sold his own collection of santos at the Newman Gallery in New York City. If he justified his brokering as a way of raising awareness of Spanish colonial arts and getting them into the hands of discerning caretakers, he also profited handsomely from buying low and selling high. Yet when nativos sought the same benefit, they, like the reckless “Mexican” of Chimayo, were considered misguided and mercenary.48 The larger problem was the creation of new works. To foster its notions of authenticity, the society set firm standards for entry into annual artistic competitions. An advertisement for a 1931 contest, open only “to the descendants of Spanish Colonial families,” outlined entrance requirements in deliberately simple terms: “The articles must be like the old time things made here and must not be like American things. The prizes will go to those articles which are most like the old Spanish Colonial things in the way they are made.” Nor did the society’s supervision end there. Playing the part of vigilant connoisseurs, members traveled to outlying villages to encourage artists to emulate acceptable styles. The chief missionary was Cyrus McCormick, Jr. Wary of the standardizing consequences of the modern factory, McCormick had long advocated a national policy of “home industry,” the making of goods in houses and village workshops. He envisioned the society primarily as an extension service, an organization that sent field-workers into the hills to teach the gospel of authentic craftmaking. McCormick himself took on the role with gusto, even to the point of telling craftmakers why their work did not make the grade. In one case, as he reported to Austin, he discovered a young artist who had gotten far off track: “I am very much afraid that he was applying too many of his own ideas, or was possibly resorting to a Sears-Roebuck catalog for his instruction.” 49 By 1931 the depressed economy prompted the society to reconsider the aggressive approach. Although McCormick argued against sales to an “uncritical, jitney public” until craftmakers were better educated, the society adopted a less exacting policy. It scaled back field instruction and applied McCormick’s money to maintaining its sales outlet. Yet the shift was hardly an about-face. Just as McCormick believed that objects embodying a “certain standard of excellence” would find a “natural outlet,” the society put its faith in the arts’ seemingly magical appeal. An appetite for handmade objects, one observer wrote, “is no beautiful dream of a lot of artists.” Their quality “is in demand today, and it will be so tomorrow.” Such confidence was not wholly out of

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place in the thirties. As industrial production stalled, the nation was awash in recriminations over “overproduction” and the apparent exhaustion of the nation’s manufacturing plant. Middle- and upper-class Americans seemed poised to reject mass-produced goods in favor of objects that embodied the virtue of the folk. As society members fielded inquiries from Dallas and New York about how to furnish rooms with “Spanish colonial” objects, they sensed they were in a singular position to capitalize on the rising demand for handcrafts, a demand that would benefit themselves as well as the Hispano makers. “The revival of the Spanish arts,” noted the society’s annual report for 1931, “is not one of those philanthropic enterprises which must be kept going by external means indefinitely [for][i]t is a movement which is directly related to the daily cultural and economic life of the people.” 50

Craftsmanship and Education Realizing the arts’ cultural and economic promise inevitably involved vocational training. To members of the society, and to several prominent educators, practical instruction in wood carving or rug weaving meant more than the chance to earn a few extra dollars. In the early 1930s, as entire communities fell onto the relief rolls, a comprehensive vocational program seemed to answer the perplexing question of how undereducated nativos would find a niche in a changing economy. Ideally, the training would equip them with skills to capitalize on northern New Mexico’s tourist trade, and it would revive towns and counties whose land base was entirely insufficient for farming and ranching. Not incidentally, it would draw on the villagers’ “instinctive” aesthetic talents and bring to life dormant cultural expressions. Such hopeful prospects seemed all the more attractive in light of the dismal state of New Mexico’s regular public schooling. Nowhere was it worse than in the Rio Arriba. Despite the adoption of a compulsory attendance law in 1891, more than half of all school-age children at the turn of the century never set foot in a schoolhouse. Those who did tended to be very young. Needing help in fields and pastures, Spanish-speaking families rarely had the luxury of schooling children for more than a few years. As late as 1938, only one-tenth of Taos County’s 4,700 students (roughly 95 percent of whom were Hispano) were enrolled in high school. A study of three other heavily Hispano counties found that of students who began first grade in the mid-1930s, 30 percent had dropped out by

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fourth grade, 65 percent had dropped out by eighth grade, and only 11 percent graduated from high school. These numbers may overstate the level of attendance. Called home at planting and harvesting time, many boys and girls who were counted among attendees had an effective school year of no more than six months. The cumulative result, magnified by poorly funded schools, was a population of young adults whose ability to read and figure left them unprepared to work in clerical, service, and managerial jobs. Although the rate of illiteracy had dropped from 78.5 percent in 1870 to 13 percent in 1930, New Mexico ranked third from the bottom of all states, and 72 percent of its illiterates were Hispanos and Indians. It was not hard for educators to conclude that a standard academic curriculum was doing little good in northern New Mexico. The remunerative possibilities of vocational training seemed much more promising.51 The idea of teaching students to weave and carve was not new to the depression. In 1919, two years after Congress passed the Smith-Hughes Act to support nationwide vocational instruction, one state official proposed public training in handcrafts. A. B. Anderson, state supervisor of trade and industrial education, argued that Hispanos should learn to make handcrafted objects and reject goods from “mail order houses in Chicago or New York.” 52 His program never materialized, perhaps because Smith-Hughes grants required matching funds from cash-strapped counties. Training in craftsmanship gained support only after the Spanish Colonial Arts Society began to foster a regional art market. In 1927 then-society member and Santa Fe County schools superintendent Nina Otero-Warren began to introduce craft training into local classrooms. Within three years she was supplying the society’s shop with her students’ work. She also brokered the sale of blankets, wood carvings, and furniture made at the Spanish-American Normal School in the village of El Rito.53 That such goods were being made at El Rito at all suggested an important shift in educational tactics. Although the SpanishAmerican Normal School was opened in 1909 to train Spanish-speaking teachers, it quickly became a source of political patronage and a market for local merchants. No high school students graduated until 1923. By 1930 it was charting a course toward vocational instruction, a key feature of which, according to school president John Conway, was the “revival of the Spanish colonial arts.” 54 The shift at El Rito was roughly coincident with the creation of the San Jose Training School, an experimental project designed to improve the education of Spanish-speaking children. In 1930, funded by U.S.

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senator Bronson Cutting and the Rockefeller Foundation’s General Education Board, which worked chiefly to improve the education of African American children in the South, the University of New Mexico (UNM) took over an existing school on Albuquerque’s south side to determine why so many Hispano students either left the classroom or fell behind national scholastic norms. The project’s director was Loyd S. Tireman, an education professor at the university and a follower of the day’s progressive principles of schooling, which focused on the student’s learning environment. Tireman believed that most Spanish-speaking students were alienated from instruction that seemed unrelated to their lives. He responded with the progressive concept of the community school. Any classroom, he believed, must incorporate the cultural practices of its immediate setting and attend to local problems of health and welfare. A school that was welcomed by its neighbors was less likely to estrange students or their parents. San Jose teachers followed that precept by, among other activities, experimenting with instruction in Spanish, visiting parents at home, and reorienting students’ lessons to objects and sights in their immediate environment. Last but not least, the school implemented a program in village craftsmanship. The aim, as Tireman put it, was not only to “re-awaken an interest in [the crafts’] beauty and usefulness” but also to use them as “an aid in stimulating the mental processes” of the pupils.55 Largely ignorant of craftsmanship matters himself, Tireman initially looked to the Santa Fe art enthusiasts. He brought his students to the capital for instruction under Frank Applegate and, perhaps hoping for favorable publicity, found Mary Austin a seat on the project’s board of directors. He may have come to regret that decision, for Austin treated him with the same dismissiveness that most of her male and female contemporaries knew all too well.56 Nonetheless, Austin’s writing, bold and synoptic as ever, influenced how her colleagues perceived the crafts and related them to the problems of everyday life. To understand Hispanos, Austin wrote to UNM president J. F. Zimmerman, one must remember that they possess a “racial temperament” fundamentally different “from what we usually think of as American.” Any worthwhile method of instruction must recognize that their “chief endowment” is “creative craftsmanship.” In place of unimaginative schooling in the three R’s, Spanish-speaking students should learn to make articles that “characteriz[e] the best of the Colonial period.” Only through such teaching could instructors hope to arrest the cultural decline.57 Tireman was soon explaining his program in similar terms. Although his chief inter-

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est lay in the community schools of Mexico, he too saw craft work in New Mexico as “an impetus to a renaissance in Spanish culture.” His assistant, Mela Sedillo Brewster, the daughter of the prominent Republican Antonio Sedillo, likewise spoke of her work in teaching “Spanish Colonial Arts and Crafts”—washing wool, tanning leather, carving wood, and pressing tin. Just as Austin drew attention to the baneful influence of the “Sears-Roebuck mail order catalogue,” Sedillo considered a craft curriculum essential in winning the support of students and freeing them from the tyranny of “mail-order-house” articles.58 Instruction at El Rito and San Jose only set the stage for a more comprehensive craft program under the State Department of Vocational Education. The leader of the effort was Tireman’s former assistant, Brice Sewell. Trained as a sculptor in St. Louis, Sewell took on a job that at first seemed less about art than about finding opportunities for the 93 percent of New Mexicans who never graduated from high school. Confronted with the additional problem of economic recession, Sewell tapped New Deal funds to establish forty-eight high school and community-based classes, all of which were tailored to local contexts. In Albuquerque, and on the state’s Anglo east side, the courses focused on welding, construction, automobile repair, irrigation mechanics, and carpentry.59 In the Rio Arriba, by contrast, instruction centered on Hispano arts. In the upriver communities of Taos, Galisteo, Costilla, Peñasco, Anton Chico, Española, Mora, and Santa Cruz, students were taught weaving, spinning, tanning, and/or wood carving. The programs put a premium on colonial authenticity, defined by the same story of Spanish inheritance and isolation that Applegate told. “For centuries,” Sewell wrote in his description of “Spanish colonial” furniture, “the colonists here remained practically isolated even from the cultural contours of Old Mexico[,] . . . the result being that we have preserved even up to the present time a great deal of the medieval culture of Old Spain.” The Spanish colonial sensibility even surfaced in descriptions of the local workshops. At Española, for example, students used raw wool to weave “[o]ld Spanish designs” and native pine to craft “old Spanish household furniture.” 60 Sewell considered fidelity to a Spanish ideal only prudent. Unable to produce objects with machinelike efficiency, craftmakers relied on the aura of Spanish inheritance to market their work. Indeed, their chief sales outlet, a market established by society member Leonara Curtain, demanded “high standards of workmanship” and sold no objects made with nails, artificial finishes, or commercial yarns. Handmade products

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would remain in demand, Sewell wrote, only if students are “thoroughly grounded in the knowledge of the best examples of the past, particularly the Spanish Colonial,” and their work is “superior in beauty and durability to the machine-made product.” Yet concerns about marketing were inseparable from cultural and aesthetic matters. Sewell argued that beyond financial benefits, craft training offered artists “a richer life in the village.” It also had a collective value. The villager who followed “the best examples of the past” helped to sustain northern New Mexico’s unique cultural milieu, keeping it insulated, as one commentator wrote, from the “standardized” billboard and filling station. Even the state WPA administrator, Lea Rowland, spoke of the need to protect New Mexico from industrial progress. “What we need here is not progress but preservation,” Rowland said in a 1937 radio address. “We should not want New Mexico civilized in the same sense that our larger cities are civilized. . . . We don’t want to destroy the evidences of the first European settlements on this whole continent.” 61

Part of the Family Ironically, the volume of Spanish colonial rhetoric heard in vocational circles rose at the same moment the Spanish Colonial Arts Society fell on hard times. The death of Frank Applegate in 1931, followed by Austin’s demise three years later, deprived the society of its most inspired members. Meanwhile, the deepening of the depression forced Bronson Cutting and Mary Cabot Wheelwright to halt their funding of craft exhibitions and markets. It also prompted Cyrus McCormick, Jr., to shelve his plans for home industry and to take up the very practical matter of emergency relief. As Applegate, Austin, and McCormick moved off the stage, a group of Spanish-speaking enthusiasts stepped on. Their appearance constituted a second irony, for it was New Mexico’s Anglodirected vocational program that heightened their public exposure. In shifting attention from the society and its capital city market to workshops throughout northern New Mexico, Sewell broke the monopoly of the Santa Fe group and allowed Hispanos who worked for or with him to set forth their own thinking about colonial craftsmanship. When the society was incorporated in 1929, only one of its twentyone trustees, Fiesta organizer Benigno Muñiz, had an Hispano surname. The group’s Anglo cast was symptomatic of divisions and inequalities long evident in New Mexico life. Although Austin and Applegate, for

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example, had lived in the state less than a decade, they exploited their status as Anglo cognoscenti to gain the kind of legitimacy unavailable to their Hispano counterparts. Austin used her literary prominence to tap fortunes made outside New Mexico and to participate in the deliberations over state educational policy. Similarly, Applegate had the scholarly credentials to claim the position of craft expert. The society may not have intentionally excluded Hispanos, but neither did it reach beyond the figures who sat on the Fiesta Council, Muñiz and Nina Otero-Warren. Sensing that the field of Spanish colonial craftsmanship was terra incognita in the 1920s, Anglo enthusiasts had no reason to believe that Hispanos could contribute to the new crusade. And because the society relied on private funds, it had little incentive to impress Hispano lawmakers with a racially integrated organization.62 As a public project, and one designed specifically to assist Hispano students, the vocational venture presented a more mixed racial aspect. At San Jose, for example, Tireman was assisted by Mela Sedillo. Sewell hired Henry Gonzales, a woodworker, as his chief assistant, and relied on Delores Perrault, a weaver, to run his programs. One of his more notable lieutenants was Carmen Espinosa. Sister of Aurelio and Gilberto Espinosa, two authorities on Spanish-speaking lore, Carmen published studies on tin work, weaving, and embroidery, all of which were animated by her “intense desire for people to know about our heritage and our culture.” Through the village crafts, she wrote, “the Spanish temperament has found an opportunity for expression that is astonishing in its versatility, beauty and usefulness.” 63 No less prominent than Espinosa was Concha Ortiz y Pino. Daughter of the sheep baron José Ortiz y Pino and descendant of two of New Mexico’s most illustrious Hispano families, Ortiz y Pino was raised in a sixty-room compound in the village of Galisteo. At a young age she learned that descent from the conquistador Nicolas Ortiz II and the statesman Don Pedro Bautista Pino was nothing to take lightly. When her brothers accompanied Don José to supervise his 50,000-acre ranch, she stayed home to care for elderly and disabled workers. In 1933, at age twenty-three, she established her own craft school in Galisteo to help unemployed ranch hands and to save the endangered “colonial arts.” Although the herders were skeptical at first, Ortiz y Pino drew them into a festive environment of old songs and dances, as well as an occasional corrida del gallo, an event in which competitors on galloping horses try to grab the neck of a partially buried chicken. Although it was more revival meeting than workshop, Ortiz y Pino’s school scored some successes. With the assistance of Sewell’s program and Curtain’s market,

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it taught ranch workers basic handcrafts. Six of her students became so proficient that Sewell hired them to teach in Taos and Peñasco. But the benefits were not just remunerative. The opportunity to make money, she remembered in a 1976 interview, convinced people to create their own objects and reject the “things from Montgomery Ward.” 64 The value of those objects was rooted firmly in Ortiz y Pino’s racial and social vision of the upper Rio Grande. Proud to call herself a norteño, an Hispano of the Rio Arriba, she found sustenance in Spanish colonial roots. “We from the North who were and are still a very few old families are very proud, very jealous of our traditions,” she said in 1993. “It’s so easy for me to look back for inspiration to the one ancestor who is so alive in our memory: Don Pedro Bautista Pino.” Ancestry was just one source of Spanish distinction. Of equal importance was the perceived distance between the humble people of the northern villages and the “Mexicans” who gradually infiltrated New Mexico during the twentieth century. In her eyes the upriver villager was a loyal worker, a dedicated servant of the patrón who had too much dignity to demand higher wages or complain about his work. He lived apart from the unreliable and dangerous Mexican “pelado.” When her father was once forced to hire Mexican shearers, he kept them segregated from the other workers. “[W]hen I was growing up,” she said, “the Spaniards up in the North were so scared of the Mexicans.” Told Mexicans were “knifers—very Indio,” she was warned to steer clear. “We don’t get along with Mexicans,” she said. “We don’t trust them, we don’t eat the same thing, we don’t know their language.” 65 A more nuanced identification with colonial times was expressed by the period’s most dynamic Spanish-speaking art enthusiast, Nina OteroWarren. Born in Los Lunas in 1881, Otero-Warren was the daughter of the unfortunate Manuel B. Otero and the niece of the Republican power brokers, Solomon and Tranquilino Luna. She married an Anglo in 1908, but the marriage lasted less than two years. Referring to herself as a widow, Otero-Warren henceforth adopted an independent and progressive stance for the teens and twenties. Stepping beyond the customary bounds of Hispana domesticity, she led the state campaign for women’s suffrage and served as a rigorous and innovative school superintendent of Santa Fe County from 1917 until 1929. In 1922 she won the Republican nomination for Congress.66 Yet for all her forward-looking proclivities, Otero-Warren cultivated the nostalgic persona of the “daughter of a Spanish don,” the scion of New Mexico’s diminished but still influential Spanish-speaking aristocracy. Like Concha Ortiz y Pino, thirty years her junior, Otero-Warren glorified the bonds of loyalty be-

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tween the patrón and the common Hispano gente. In Old Spain in Our Southwest, she fondly recalled how Rio Arriba villagers in colonial times “were all proud of the masters they served, proud to be part of the family.” Such notions were more than literary fancy. In the 1922 campaign, for example, newspaper articles frequently cited her “picturesque ancestry” and “romantic Spanish past.” She herself devoted more than half of one campaign statement to the achievements of her colonial forebears.67 The dual tendencies were also apparent in Otero-Warren’s approach to schooling los paisanos. As a progressive educator, she sought to equip students with the means to pursue opportunities in a modernizing economy. “[I]t is in our best interests that we become educated according to the standards of the nation,” she wrote in the Survey in 1931. “It has for us its distinct advantages, its definite protection.” Unlike Mary Austin, who remained fixated on craftsmanship, Otero-Warren advocated a firm grounding in history, geography, and arithmetic. Concerned in particular with the teaching of English, to adults as well as children, she worked in the late 1930s as director of New Mexico’s WPA literacy program. Yet her educational philosophy was inspired in equal measure by the negative impact of “standardized commercialism” on the “descendant of the Spanish Colonials.” The effect was most damaging in the area of handmade arts, where the seduction of “cheaper American products” eroded the basis of Hispano culture. Hence her efforts, beginning in 1927, to supply the Santa Fe market with objects produced in the local schools and at El Rito. Even as “children are getting their diplomas in reading, writing and arithmetic,” she lamented, “we are overlooking their expression of beauty in the native arts and crafts which would be, were these incorporated into the curriculum, a definite contribution to the cultural background of this country.” In other words, programs in weaving, tin work, and wood carving would not only put rural Hispanos “on a sound economic basis.” They would also preserve “the traditions of this New Spain” and thereby forestall the homogenizing effects of machine civilization throughout America.68 Thus buoyed by the warm ideal of colonial craftsmanship, OteroWarren and her associates, Anglo and Hispano, could not fully come to terms with cold economic reality: Hispano crafts never found their needed market. The hope that they would attain national or at least regional prominence never panned out. Indeed, they proved unequal throughout the Southwest to the popularity of Indian-made objects. Unlike Pueblo pottery or Navajo blankets, which were often purchased for speculation, santos and colcha embroidery were valued mainly by

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specialized collectors. Nor did hand-carved furniture take the region by storm. And much to the chagrin of Brice Sewell, the best-selling works were those deemed least authentic. One article of faith among art enthusiasts, for example, was the inferiority of Chimayo blankets. Woven with factory-made Germantown yarns, they had supposedly become so “commercialized and cheapened” that they lost all profitability. In fact, the use of the inexpensive and brightly colored yarns attracted more buyers to Chimayo than any other village. Reluctant to market such “mass-produced” goods, Santa Fe’s art enthusiasts were inevitably left with a glut of unsold objects.69 The more interesting question is how Hispano craftspeople fared. One clue is found in the letters they sent to the Spanish Colonial Arts Society, most of which reflect an eagerness to sell their work in Santa Fe. For example, Beatrice Ortiz, a quilt maker from El Rito, informed the society that she had received a prescribed design and was making embroidered blankets accordingly. Mrs. Ismael Ulibarri likewise urged the society to accept a second shipment of her crafts.70 Although it is not clear how much money such artists earned, profits were not unheard of. The most celebrated success took place in the village of Chupadero. Its residents, numbering roughly three hundred in 1935, had long made a living by selling piñon wood in Santa Fe. When the availability of natural gas rendered their trade unprofitable, Chupadero’s economy collapsed, and by 1933 every family was on direct relief. With Sewell’s assistance, the villagers constructed a small workshop for wood, wool, and leather work. Demand for their products soon grew, and before long a number of residents were able to leave the relief rolls. Yet Chupadero was by no means typical. Decent economic returns ordinarily came only to the most highly regarded craftmakers, not to whole villages. And even those who attained virtuoso status did not necessarily strike it rich. The most telling case in point is that of the Taos wood-carver Patrocino Barela. In 1936 his work was shown in New York’s Museum of Modern Art as part of its fall exhibition, “New Horizons in American Art.” Hailed by the museum as “the most dramatic discovery made in American art for the past several years,” Barela was known as the Rio Arriba’s most brilliant craftsman. Yet he earned less as a WPA-sponsored artist than as a laborer, and sales of his work did little to end his material struggles. For the remainder of his years, he lived in poverty, peddling occasional carvings for bottles of Tokay.71 The same year that Barela’s carvings appeared in New York, the folklorist Arthur Campa led a study of the economic impact of Hispano and Indian crafts. The critical reviewer of Nina Otero’s Old Spain in Our

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Southwest, Campa was already known for his dislike of sentimental tributes to “somnolent Spanish villages.” His report showed similar disfavor with a blind faith in the crafts’ economic potential. He concluded, for example, that even with Chimayo’s reputation and proximity to Santa Fe, a family of weavers there cleared only $182 a year, a sum that could never serve as more than supplemental income. “Much harm has been done,” he wrote, “by imbuing the craftsman with the idea that a large income may be derived from entering any craft.” Rather than play the role of “Spanish colonial” artist, the craftmaker should constantly adapt his skills to new designs and markets, always mindful of presentday tastes. Only through practical adaptation, Campa argued, can the “rich cultural heritage of New Mexico . . . survive this machine age.” 72 To some degree, at least, Campa was preaching to the converted. By the mid-1930s Spanish art enthusiasts were already losing confidence that colonial authenticity could achieve what Otero-Warren called the “sound economic basis” of the village. The depression was chiefly to blame. As it limited sales of all nonessential goods, it disrupted craft markets and the institutions that supported them. For example, after the San Jose Project ran out of funds in 1935, it left little trace on the community it sought to revive.73 Economic doldrums likewise changed the way outsiders looked upon the Rio Arriba. By the late 1930s the sentimentalism of picturesque villages served up by writers and tourist promoters competed with an emerging realism. In spite of their own biases about paisano capabilities, federal researchers sought to bring the area under the governance of social science. By decade’s end it became clear that significant improvement in the villagers’ lives would require radical changes in the regional economy: consolidation of farming lands, industrial training for displaced villagers, and accelerated out-migration. What ultimately changed northern New Mexico was the coming of World War II. In 1939 vocational training in craftsmanship was effectively shelved when federal funds were redirected to industrial preparedness. When the war began, military service and defense-related jobs convinced many younger Hispanos to seek their futures in Albuquerque and points beyond. Neither the villages nor the perception of village arts would ever be quite the same.74 The end of the arts revival brings to mind several questions. One might wonder in the first place why the enthusiasts appeared so anxious about “the machine” and why they commonly sought refuge in a distinctively Spanish colonial past. The question is not meant to cast suspicion on the enthusiasts’ undeniably heartfelt anxieties over radios,

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billboard advertising, or the evils of “standardization.” Nor should it diminish their affection for the Rio Arriba villages or their concern for los paisanos. When Nina Otero-Warren (to take one example) expressed her hope of preserving a disappearing tradition and stimulating a stagnant economy, she was not out to disguise more nefarious purposes. Still, one need not attempt to plumb deep psychological motives to recognize why she and other enthusiasts were so repelled by “the machine” and so taken with the ideal of colonial craftsmanship. For Otero-Warren and Ortiz y Pino, as well as for Applegate, Austin, McCormick, and Sewell, mechanized production presented a dual menace. Like other critics, they found it soulless. It offended their aesthetic sensibilities, their love of fine crafts, and their belief in the creative possibilities of basic labor. But in its broadest sense, “the machine” struck much closer to home, for it called into question their own roles as arbiters of value. By overwhelming the nation with the tastes and goods of mass society, machine civilization threatened to undermine the authority of Mary Austin and Nina Otero-Warren to judge artistic and cultural excellence.75 The Spanish cast of handmade objects was certainly not crucial to resisting “the machine.” During the twenties and thirties, Pueblo pottery and Mexican handcrafts also came to represent a vibrancy not found in the antiseptic American “Middletown.” Yet no art enthusiast, Anglo or Hispano, would ever refer to the Spanish colonial arts as “Mexican.” Along with their higher market values, distinctively “Spanish colonial” tables and blankets told Anglos a welcome story. They reminded newcomers that while los paisanos were racially undesirable, they bore within their souls a Spanish colonial legacy. So understood, the objects affirmed the enthusiasts’ decision to settle in New Mexico and live among a poor, nonwhite people. Spanish-speaking art enthusiasts had somewhat different motives. Although separated by family lineage from the bulk of nativo society—Sedillo, Ortiz y Pino, and Otero-Warren all married Anglos—they also recognized the fragility of their social positions amid the growth of Anglo power. Each realized that her own influence over New Mexican society would never equal that of the nineteenth-century patriarchs. By 1930 the old sheep empires were rapidly dwindling, and the county political machines, including the one run by Nina’s brother, Eduardo, were but shadows of former fiefdoms. In the new climate the ideal of Spanish colonial craftsmanship helped to restore the family name to prominence. By turning impoverished paisanos into Spanish colonial craftmakers, it encouraged Hispana enthusiasts to act as cultural patronas, leaders of a Spanish colonial culture.76 Beyond the matter of motives is the issue of power. In bringing to-

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gether villagers and artists, educators and philanthropists, tourists and writers, the wealthy, the middling, and the poor, the arts revival inevitably begs the question of gains and losses. Scholars have looked at the balance sheet in different ways. One line of argument focuses on artistic consequences. It asserts that the mostly Anglo enthusiasts upset the place of art in the Rio Arriba village. By dictating styles and encouraging sales, intrusive admirers turned objects valued by paisano villagers into commodities of an outside art market.77 A second conclusion concerns economic outcomes. It finds that the arts revival hurt Hispanos by reinforcing a dual labor market: whereas Sewell’s vocational programs offered students in predominantly Anglo counties training in construction and auto mechanics, it confined Hispanos of the Rio Arriba to weaving and carving. The economic argument is congruent with broader claims about northern New Mexico and other rural areas of the United States. Scholars locally and nationally have argued that an infatuation with “picturesque” places has only fostered an ethos of underdevelopment, a love of the primitive that hinders the progress of real people, whether they be Hispanos, Indians, or Appalachians.78 Both arguments, the artistic and the economic, are somewhat overdrawn. The real impact of the arts revival was more subtle. Most Hispano craftmakers readily joined vocational programs and adapted their art to whatever the market called for, whether “authentic” or otherwise. They did so because northern New Mexico had so few economic opportunities. If Hispanos were indeed “channeled” into craft making, the goal was to enable them to make a living off tourist dollars. State officials simply could not imagine more than a handful of mechanics ever finding employment in Cundiyo or Chimayo, nor could they foresee the massive outward migration that occurred a decade later.79 The more important consequence of the arts revival was its public imagery. Against the backdrop of the lazy “Mexican,” who shuffled suspiciously from job to job, the revival depicted Hispano craftmakers as diligent men and women who worked at home, in quiet and peaceful villages. “[T]he Spanish people have just the temperament and artistic nature to devote themselves tirelessly to producing the useful and beautiful,” wrote one observer. Conversely, as Cyrus McCormick put it, “the New Mexican is not capable of being industrialized when at work in a factory.” Always identified in relation to a particular village, Hispano craftmakers were rendered as domesticated and indeed, in the cases of men, as almost demasculinized workers. Welcomed at the Fiesta of the late 1920s, the image of village domesticity was still more potent in the arts

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revival, for it signified how los paisanos could at once take their places quietly in modern New Mexico and ward off the evils of the machine age. The epitome of the domesticated old craftmaker was Celso Gallegos, the elderly and disabled santero who, according to Mary Austin, wept with gratitude when he received his Fiesta award. “Utterly primitive” and “a true descendant of the Spanish conquistadores,” Gallegos seemed to embody the power of a Spanish past to hold the machine at bay while rendering irrelevant his own health and material welfare. “He appreciates and needs the income that comes from his work,” one writer observed, “but to him the work itself is the important thing. There is no one in Santa Fe who radiates more happiness than this simple man who is doing the things he loves for the joy that is contained in the actual doing.” 80 Almost by definition, the Spanish arts revival was peculiar to northern New Mexico. A good part of its allure was the idea of seclusion, the notion of an artistic tradition aging in the crucible of the Rio Arriba. Keeping a constant eye on the encroaching “machine age,” art enthusiasts did their best to shelter craftmakers from its onslaught. As they dug into their defensive position, other glorifiers of the Rio Arriba village went on the attack. They were New Mexico’s “regionalist” writers. During the late twenties and thirties, they turned los paisanos into the standard-bearers of authenticity in a nationwide battle against spiritual barrenness. As Santa Fe reveled in its Fiesta and art enthusiasts paid tribute to melancholy santos, poets and novelists were hard at work recasting the “Mexican” of long-standing literary repute into the salvation of a standardized America.

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chapter 6

Regionalism and the Literature of the Soil, 1928 –1938 Can the Southwest keep the spaciousness and the leisure which are cordial to a harmonious philosophy of life? Or will it be forced by the tyranny of the machine to the same slavery of time and labor and thought which dictates the day of industrial America elsewhere? T. M. Pearce, America in the Southwest, 1933

In 1921 Paul Walter prophesied a future that he could not have imagined just two decades earlier. When he arrived in New Mexico in 1899, Walter had put his hopes in unhindered economic development. Ascending quickly to the role of chief territorial booster, the Republican stalwart called on residents and migrants to end economic stagnation by turning unexploited land into productive mines and irrigated farms. Things did not go as he hoped. Over the next twenty years, as California repeatedly upstaged New Mexico’s efforts to attract migrants, tourists, and capital, Walter’s Republican Party was divided by racial discord and insurgent progressivism. In 1912 he lost control of the state’s most prominent newspaper, the Santa Fe New Mexican, to the wealthy reformer Bronson Cutting. Setting up shop as editor of El Palacio, the unofficial press agency of Edgar Hewett and the Museum of New Mexico, Walter looked on in anger as Cutting rose in power and the call for economic development drowned in the din of political stalemate. Frustrated by the state of public affairs, he offered a prediction of how the young state would be remembered by future generations. When the 190

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“contemporary notoriety of some second rate politician” is long forgotten, he wrote pointedly, the state’s works of art and literature will endure. Even though New Mexico “has contributed but little to solutions of present-day political, economic or sociological problems,” he concluded, “[its works of imagination] will be remembered and praised long after the present-day bickering of politicians and shibboleths of statesmen and orators, which now fill press and public mind to the exclusion almost of the real essentials in life, are forgotten. Where there is no vision, people perish.” 1 Walter’s prediction was not far off target. Few New Mexicans today recall the political debates of the interwar years, the rise of Cutting, the party realignment of 1932, or even the subsequent ascendancy of modern New Mexico’s most prominent political figure, U.S. Sen. Dennis Chávez. Far more memorable are the writers and artists who depicted the land and people of northern New Mexico. The literary contribution is particularly noteworthy, for although painters brought the region’s visual imagery before a national audience, writers set forth fascinating narratives about the upper Rio Grande’s nonwhite peoples.2 Works such as Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927) and Mabel Dodge Luhan’s Winter in Taos (1935) introduced readers throughout the nation to the upper Rio Grande and the lives of seemingly primitive paisanos and Indians. So, too, did the less famous but no less compelling writing of Mary Austin, Raymond Otis, Harvey Fergusson, and Fray Angelico Chavez. Beholding northern New Mexico as an anomaly in twentieth-century America, a place of unique temporal and racial character, each of the writers searched for its meaning in the context of a rapidly modernizing nation.3 In an indirect way, the meanings they uncovered suited the conservative bent of Paul Walter. Walter was a booster, journalist, and banker, not a creative writer, and he had little to do with Santa Fe’s literary community. Yet when he distinguished in 1921 the realm of practical politics from the creative work of literature, he hinted at a divide that appeared repeatedly in New Mexico letters over the next two decades (and one that, in some measure, remains in place today). The most celebrated writing of the period represented a flight from critical politics writ large, from “present-day political, economic or sociological problems” and into a reassuring preindustrial past. The apolitical orientation is particularly striking in the literary depictions of rural Hispanos. In the nineteenth century assorted soldiers, missionaries, and travel writers described los paisanos as unsuited for citizenship in an American republic.

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Racial backwardness and want of virtue stood out against a white and forward-looking nation. After the Great War, treatments of los paisanos became more sympathetic but less anchored to expectations of industrial and social progress. With some notable exceptions, prominent literary works portrayed Hispano villagers as bearers of folk wisdom, a people who knew enough to keep their distance from a cold and sterile world. Finding sustenance in warm agrarian traditions, they confronted their future by turning to their past. The conservative orientation was characteristic of an interwar literary project known as southwestern regionalism. Beginning in the late 1920s, New Mexican writers joined scholars, novelists, and poets from neighboring states to rethink the relationship of the Southwest to a powerful American metropole. In theory, their collective discussions and individual writing need not have taken on a conservative inflection. On the broadest level, concerns about regional autonomy and national power were shared by left-leaning writers and critics, some of whom were aligned with the politics of the American Popular Front. But whereas Popular Front writers in the Southwest zeroed in on inequalities of race and wealth, giving particular attention to the exploitation of Spanish-speaking peoples, regionalists framed the problem of the Southwest as one of “identity” and “standardization.” Like the more celebrated Southern Agrarians, southwestern regionalists envisioned a distinctive regional identity as resistant to the growing sameness of America. To fashion that identity through their prose, the writers looked to agrarian communities. Among other sites, including the Anglo cow town and the Indian pueblo, the Hispano village of the Rio Arriba was considered an unparalleled source of regional meaning. With its field and pasture economy, its rich lode of folklore, and its exotic Catholic ceremonies, the Rio Arriba village was the perfect antidote to American standardization—so long as it remained isolated from the racial overtones of the “Mexican.” Hence the indispensable importance of a Spanish colonial past. In keeping with the rhetoric of the Fiesta and the arts revival, authors identified their subjects as “Spanish” or, in less direct fashion, as bearers of ancestral traditions rooted in the Rio Arriba. During the 1930s, as growing hostility to Mexican Americans throughout the Southwest led to threats of deportation, an imagined Spanish inheritance turned otherwise poor and mestizo characters into icons of regional distinction, characters whose dislocation from real political concerns ironically served only to deprive them of true historical weight.

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The Benighted Mexican: Willa Cather and Harvey Fergusson Southwestern regionalism emerged in a social context that was decidedly unfriendly to Spanish-speaking people. At the end of the nineteenth century, changes in land policy under Porfirio Díaz set in motion thousands of Mexican immigrants. Between 1890 and 1930 as many as one and a half million farmers and laborers reached the United States, most of whom settled in Texas and California. The welcome they received from Anglo residents was at best ambivalent. Actively recruited by agricultural, mining, and railroad corporations, but only to work at backbreaking jobs for low wages, Mexicans were otherwise treated with varying degrees of condescension and outright contempt. The most intense hostility arose among nativists, patriotic societies, the American Federation of Labor, and poor white farmers, all of whom regarded the Mexican immigrant as a blight on the landscape.4 One observer in Los Angeles described his Spanish-speaking neighbors as “diseased of body, subnormal intellectually, and moral morons of the most hopeless type.” In Texas a constituent complained to U.S. Rep. John C. Box of “[h]erds of unwashed greasers . . . sizzling with disease.” Like many of his supporters, Box’s position on the matter was crystal clear. “I am in favor of keeping Texas white,” he said.5 The anti-Mexican rhetoric, rooted in long-standing attitudes, can also be traced to contemporary fears. Although the United States enjoyed exceptional aggregate growth throughout the 1920s, fortune was less kind to small farmers in the Southwest. Faced with stagnant crop prices and rising costs, white tenants considered low-paid Mexican laborers a serious threat to their economic independence. Meanwhile, the development of racism as a pseudoscience after 1900 encouraged other critics to envision a northward-flowing brown peril. Newfound desires to control the nation’s racial stock prompted the legislative push of the teens and twenties to restrict the immigration of undesirable people. Culminating in the National Origins Act, the restrictionist campaign was opposed in the Southwest by corporate growers, and it was their sway in Congress that left Mexican immigration largely unimpeded until 1930. When the depression hit southwestern cities, however, restrictions alone were deemed insufficient, and legions of ethnic Mexicans, perhaps numbering as many as six hundred thousand, were returned to Mexico.6 Anglos in New Mexico adopted a less adversarial stance. Compared

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to other southwestern areas, the state’s Spanish-speaking population remained demographically and geographically stable. A lack of agricultural and construction jobs kept Mexican immigration at relatively low rates, which ensured in turn that Anglo residents, growing more numerous every year, would enjoy increasing political influence. A dearth of Mexican immigrants likewise meant that most Spanish-speaking people were confined to the small towns of northern and central New Mexico, far from the Anglo strongholds, the eastern and southern counties. Whether farming their secluded fields or migrating to seasonal jobs in Colorado and Wyoming, Hispanos posed little threat of undercutting Anglo livelihoods or attending predominantly white schools. At the same time, Hispanos’ long-standing demographic presence and political influence forced Anglos to take a conciliatory position. Whether or not Anglos accepted their neighbors as descendants of Spanish settlers, they could not, in the spirit of Representative Box, imagine New Mexico as a purely Anglo commonwealth. Still, the state was far from a model of toleration. During the 1930s, Mexican immigrants were routinely deported, particularly when they attempted to organize a workers’ league. In cities such as Albuquerque and Santa Fe, where Anglos and Hispanos came into daily contact, unspoken rules of segregation determined whom one might date, which shops one might frequent, and which fraternal organization one might join. In connection with a survey of Hispanos and Anglos conducted in 1926, the sociologist Manuel Gamio concluded that a “very considerable amount of friction,” often expressed as “a smoldering resentment,” existed between the two groups. At fault, Gamio suggested, was a pervasive Anglo sense of racial superiority and general indifference to Spanish-speaking people.7 One of the more evocative literary expressions of that disposition is also the most artful tale of Hispano New Mexico, Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop. Cather is not typically regarded as a southwestern writer. Born in Virginia and raised in Nebraska, she is rightly famous for her melancholy novels about the open prairie, My Antonia being the best known. Yet during her itinerant adult years, Cather traveled several times through northern areas of Arizona and New Mexico. As the acclaimed critic Lawrence Clark Powell suggests, beginning with her visit in 1912, the Southwest became her deepest source of inspiration. Her most important sojourn took place in 1925. Having entertained D. H. Lawrence and his wife at her New York apartment the previous year, she accepted an invitation to visit the couple’s Taos ranch. There, at La Fonda in Santa Fe, and in the mountain villages in between,

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Cather rapidly collected the historical material and visual images that appeared in print two years later. The result was a surprise. Unlike her Taos hosts, and certainly unlike Mary Austin, whose house she occupied while writing the book, Cather found little to admire in Pueblo Indians and paisano villagers. Far more heroic and compelling to her way of thinking were the Europeans and Americans who tamed New Mexico’s seemingly primitive peoples.8 Death Comes for the Archbishop was a monument to one such life. It told the fictionalized tale of Jean-Baptiste Lamy, the French bishop whose post-1850 reordering of New Mexico’s Catholic Church paralleled Anglo efforts to control the region’s political economy. Arriving in the new American territory in 1852, the real Lamy had consolidated ecclesiastical power in large part by expelling his Spanish-speaking opponents. His fictional counterpart, Father Jean Latour, works with a gentler hand yet shoulders his duty, in the words of his cosmopolitan elders in Rome, to clean New Mexico’s “Augean stable.” 9 Like a missionary of the colonial period, Latour establishes himself in his new vicarate only after trudging northward up the Rio Grande and across the unforgiving desert. Once in New Mexico he gradually but firmly reins in childlike paisanos and wayward priests. His most difficult challenge is the renegade Padre Antonio José Martínez. In real life Martínez was a zealous liberal and New Mexico’s most important nineteenth-century educator. Committed to broad-based literacy, he established the territory’s first college for young men and women in 1826. Eight years later he brought the first printing press to New Mexico and published the territory’s first book. In Cather’s novel he is scholarly but corrupt and dangerous, a man of “disturbing, mysterious, magnetic power” who has lured his parishioners into debauchery. “You are a young man,” he tells Latour. And you know nothing about Indians or Mexicans. If you try to introduce European civilization here and change our old ways, to interfere with the secret dances of the Indians, let us say, or abolish the bloody rites of the Penitentes, I foretell an early death for you. . . . You are among barbarous people, my Frenchman, between two savage races.

Latour is not intimidated. When the defiant Taos priest organizes the “Holy Catholic Church of Mexico,” Latour excommunicates him. After a short illness, Martínez dies and, so it is said among his parishioners, his soul is borne into torment.10 If, as Powell tells us, Cather immediately esteemed the book a “masterpiece,” she was not alone. Writing a few years after its publication,

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one critic concluded that it singlehandedly brought the potential richness of southwestern fiction to national attention. In local circles there was less enthusiasm. Incensed by the portrayal of base and backward paisanos, Austin also protested the heroic treatment of Bishop Lamy— she called his work “a calamity to local culture”—and publicly denounced Cather.11 One writer who could sympathize with the novelist’s plight was Harvey Fergusson. A newspaperman by training, and a nononsense outdoorsman, Fergusson did not orbit in Cather’s sophisticated literary circles. Nor could his workmanlike phrasing match her elegant prose. What he shared with Cather was the status of an outsider. Although born in Albuquerque, he left New Mexico as a young man and returned only for brief visits. More important, Fergusson’s jaundiced portrayals of Hispano New Mexico set him apart from the Santa Fe literary milieu. He made his position perfectly clear in his first book, a 1921 novel of Spanish-speaking power and dissolution he titled Blood of the Conquerors. 12 Fergusson’s book is best understood in light of his upbringing. The author was the grandson of a southern planter and the son of Harvey B. Fergusson, the progressive Democrat who represented the racial intolerance of New Mexico’s eastern and southeastern counties. Although Fergusson the politician enjoyed considerable electoral success, his ambitions were ultimately stymied by Hispano Republicans like Solomon Luna and Eduardo Otero. Most infuriating was the all-consuming “race issue” of the 1910s. Fergusson the writer saw his father’s political frustrations intertwined with the politics of race. Like Paul Walter and Dana Johnson, the writer laid responsibility for racial hostility at the feet of Hispano leaders. With his father overpowered by politically organized paisanos, the writer was both angry at those who peddled racial claims and fearful of the havoc they might wreak.13 Blood of the Conquerors was his response. At once an attack on New Mexico’s Spanish-speaking elite and a defense of Anglo supremacy, the book tells the story of the privileged but hot-blooded “Mexican,” Ramón Delcasar, a young lawyer who goes to battle against the wily and industrious newcomers. Fergusson created Delcasar to capture every one of the pathologies he linked to the new generation of Hispano leaders. Descended of an aristocratic family, Delcasar has lost touch with “Spanish civilization,” and though he boasts of “pure Castilian blood,” he is in fact “of a mongrel breed.” Uninterested in Spanish-speaking women, his taste runs to Anglo blonds. Too lazy for real work, he plays the part of a young attorney but survives on his family inheritance. Whiling away his days at the card

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table, he realizes that his only real satisfaction is his ancestral land in the Rio Arriba. When an Anglo cattle rancher plots to take control of it, Delcasar finds he cannot match the Anglo’s energy and intelligence. His back to the wall, he “preach[es] the race issue” to local villagers. Exhorting los paisanos not to sell out, he reminds them of their inheritance: “Remember . . . that in your veins is the blood of the conquerors— blood which was poured out on these hills and valleys to win them from the Indians, precious blood which has made this land priceless to you for all time.” His plea succeeds, and for a moment he resists the Anglo challenge. Inevitably, however, his vices get the best of him. At the novel’s end, nearly bankrupt, he takes to farming a small plot, the only work at which he excels.14 To Fergusson the “race issue” was nothing more than a desperate and unscrupulous tactic, the only hope for Hispanos who, retarded by their racial temperament, could never succeed fairly in business or politics. Ancestry was the last card they could play. Such bald sentiments tempt the reader to imagine Fergusson as the stereotypical Albuquerque newcomer, the midwestern transplant who joined the chamber of commerce and worked to make all vestiges of Hispano life quickly disappear. In truth, Fergusson was more complicated. Little enamored of modern Albuquerque and its pallid Rotarian ethos, his real love was the heroism he imagined in New Mexico’s past. In Rio Grande, his 1931 interpretive history of New Mexico, Fergusson wrote nostalgically of intrepid mountain men and Santa Fe Trail riders. Beguiled by legends of a Spanish colonial aristocracy, he likewise paid tribute to conquistadors and the “gente fina” who reigned before 1821. In the modern day, Fergusson found only lesser breeds: a tamer, if more efficient, Anglo and the decadent and dissolute “Mexican,” a figure for whom “Spanish” or “Spanish-American” would never do. Unexcited as he was by the new Anglo commercial order, Fergusson was unwilling to ignore its incompatibility with the Spanish colonial fancy. “Of the aristocratic Spanish life with its feudal character,” he wrote in Rio Grande, “there is only a wistful remnant.” 15

The Regionalist Persuasion Bred from inferior racial stock, severed from its Spanish roots, confronted by an advanced Anglo civilization, the “Mexican” culture in the works of Fergusson and Cather only perpetuated the anti-Hispano bias

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that had long colored published accounts of New Mexico. Yet even as the pitch of racial hostility rose across the Southwest in the twenties and early thirties, a more sympathetic portrayal was in the works, a portrayal born of the same impulses that lay behind the Santa Fe Fiesta and the arts revival. Dismayed by mechanized production, mass consumption, and an apparent sterility of human belief and aspiration, writers found inspiration in the lives of los paisanos, a people transformed by colonial inheritance from poor and mostly dark-complexioned peasants into fascinating and fully approachable Spanish villagers. No work connected ordinary Hispanos to a Spanish legacy quite as forcefully as Caballeros, Ruth Laughlin Barker’s romantic account of Santa Fe. Part history, part memoir, part guidebook, Caballeros stands less as a work of high literature than as the epitome of faith in a transformative Spanish heritage. No one would confuse the Hispanos depicted in Caballeros with the “Mexicans” of nineteenth-century literature. Barker made that point with some subtlety (and perhaps accidentally) by shifting her narrative voice nonchalantly throughout the book between colonial past and twentieth-century present. Intentional or not, the slippage was hardly necessary, for Barker makes her meaning explicit. “Here is the last stand of Spain in North America,” she writes in her opening pages. “Oñate’s entrada in 1598 brought four hundred colonists to settle in the Rio Grande Valley. They formed a nucleus of a purely Spanish culture whose traditions were so intensified in their isolation that the Andalusian folk ways of 1900 were not so different from those of 1600.” Whether rich or poor, Barker tells us, modern-day Hispanos draw from that culture their dignity and contentment. All take heart in the memories of their ancestors, the “distinguished nobility of Spain, a different type of men from the impoverished religious refugees who were to land on Plymouth Rock twenty-two years later.” Even if ordinary folk must struggle to make a living, their poverty is nothing like that of the urban tenement dweller. “Cash is always scarce but so are necessities,” she writes, and “poverty [is] clothed in dignity.” 16 Barker’s words were hardly original, of course; by 1932 the Santa Fe air was thick with tributes to Spanish colonial days. More notable is Barker’s conventional background. Hardly a bohemian transplant, she married a local insurance agent and spent most of her life in Santa Fe after her birth there in 1889. During the 1926 squabble over the Culture Center she sided with Edgar Hewett and spoke publicly against “New Santa Fe,” the derisive label she assigned to artists and writers who threatened to divide the once-friendly town. Yet her distance from the

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self-conscious literati did not keep her from embracing their rhetoric. She, too, described an Hispano folk culture as a bulwark against the insults of modern America. The spirit of Spanish folk drama, she wrote, expressed in plays such as “El Niño Perdido” and “Los Posadas,” was under assault by the “blare of radios and talkies.” Spanish colonial crafts represented an oasis of creativity in “our standardized twentieth century.” If she did not pose the problem of “mechanization” or “Middletown” in the elaborate terms of Edward Sapir or Mary Austin, she nonetheless drew on the language of the day to make sense of changing times.17 The dual rhetoric of anxiety and folk romance was characteristic of the broader literary context in which Caballeros was published: southwestern regionalism. The regionalist persuasion was adopted by, among others, Santa Fe writers Barker, Alice Corbin Henderson, Raymond Otis, Paul Horgan, Mary Austin, Nina Otero-Warren, Haniel Long, and Witter Bynner; New Mexico writers S. Omar Barker and Ross Calvin; UNM English professor and editor of the New Mexico Quarterly, T. M. Pearce; John H. McGinnis and Henry Nash Smith, editors of the Texasbased Southwest Review; Texas writer J. Frank Dobie; and Oklahoma folklorist B. A. Botkin. Given its numerous practitioners, regionalism in the Southwest was understood in different ways, and it never amounted to a coherent plan of action. All literary figures who took part at least assumed a link between their writing and their southwestern setting. Most also believed that the region was little understood or appreciated by eastern audiences and publishers, and they hoped to cultivate a recognizable southwestern voice (perhaps raising their individual profiles in the process). In 1932, for example, writers and poets in Santa Fe kicked off their own publishing initiative, known as Writers’ Editions, to free themselves “from the dictates of the Eastern publishing clique that determines what shall or shall not be published.” But regionalism was not merely a publicity campaign or a cry for attention. At its core was a serious ideological discussion over the place of the Southwest in rejuvenating American literature.18 The discussion began formally in 1929, when the Southwest Review asked recognized writers and scholars whether “the Southwestern landscape and common traditions can (or should) develop a culture recognizable as unique and more satisfying and profound than our present imported culture and art.” The question confused some of the respondents, and others found it leading toward provincialism and excessive self-consciousness. Yet most replied in the affirmative. To a notable ex-

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tent they shared the anxieties of J. Frank Dobie, who called for a circling of the wagons lest “the masses entirely forsake their heritage and become standardized by jazz, radios, chain stores, and gasoline.” Or, as the literary scholar Howard Mumford Jones wrote, the “avalanche” of midwestern values in the Southwest must be checked; local traditions can and must flower. “Is the filling station,” Jones asked, “is the Saturday Evening Post, is the sexy novel, is the Broadway drama to be the sealine of our endeavors?” To hold all such influences at bay and to reach a higher level of artistry, Dobie and Jones argued, southwestern writers must turn inward, away from the metropole and toward the cow town, the Indian pueblo, and the Hispano village.19 The none-too-subtle replies offer clues to what southwestern regionalism was all about. References to “chain stores” and the Saturday Evening Post suggest both a visceral aversion to the perceived flattening of American taste and an anxiety over the future of artistic discrimination in a mass age. The more Americans listened to jazz and jejune radio comedies, the more figures as different as Dobie and Jones worried that their authority as cultural soothsayers was slipping. Nor was mass behavior the regionalists’ only target. Of equal concern were the “ultra-sophisticated” pursuits of an eastern urban elite. Orbiting somewhere above New York and Boston, the eastern intelligentsia was said to have deliberately severed connections to authentic peoples and places. Because they were unmoored to a place or a people, the sophisticated urban writers turned out a “superficial” literature that spoke only to themselves. To these twin challenges of standardization and superficiality, the most outspoken southwestern writers responded by turning inward, to the concrete lives of the “folk,” the Anglos, Indians, and Hispanos who cultivated rejuvenating traditions on their small plots of land. “A regional culture is the sum,” Austin wrote, “expressed in ways of living and thinking, of the mutual adaptations of a land and of a people. In the long run, the land wins. If the people does not adapt itself willingly and efficiently, the land destroys it and makes room for another tribe.” It was only in simple agrarian lives, regionalist critics maintained, that authentic culture found a home. The job of the writer was to embrace and reinterpret the lives and lore of the folk, translating songs, rites, and legends into the foundational narratives of a more diverse regional society. In that way, as B. A. Botkin put it, the educated writer could create “a genuine American myth and fable.” 20 The near-mystical allure of folk life and lore reflected the conservative tilt of the southwestern regionalists, an inclination—labeled fascist by their most strenuous critics—that put them within philosophical

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earshot of the well-known Southern Agrarians. Southwesterners and southerners spoke a similar language and, at times, spoke to each other. For example, the Arkansas poet John Gould Fletcher corresponded with T. M. Pearce and presented the Agrarian philosophy to the first gathering of New Mexico regionalist writers in 1933. Attacking eastern sophistication, Fletcher urged the assembly to take its own primitivist stand in the Southwest. Accompanying Fletcher was Tennessee native John Crowe Ransom, the brilliant philosopher whose “Aesthetic of Regionalism,” perhaps the purest statement of the Agrarian creed, opened with reflections on New Mexico’s Pueblo Indians and concluded with an observation that neither Ruth Laughlin Barker nor any participant in the Spanish arts revival could resist. Directing his wrath against the “machine economy,” he described an American industrialism that had advanced like the “disruptive force of a barbarian conquest.” As it separated man from nature, the machine forever divided laborers from the art of work. And even as it served forth a cornucopia of goods, it drained them of aesthetic and spiritual meaning.21 Yet the Southwest was not the South. Lacking in New Mexico was the creative tension between the nostalgic siren of the folk and the progressive aims of social science. By the 1930s the South was already becoming recognized as an anthropological and sociological laboratory. To the west of the Agrarians’ Nashville redoubt stood the Mississippi Delta communities soon to be dissected in John Dollard’s study of caste and class. To the east lay the stately academic grounds of Chapel Hill, where Howard Odum, before his conversion to Agrarianism, led empirical inquiries into southern poverty. Similar polarities of nostalgia and progress appeared in other regions of the country, and sometimes within the complex thinking of a single writer. In New York City, for example, Lewis Mumford extolled the “Golden Day” of antebellum America yet looked forward to the promise of regional planning in rejuvenating a dying civilization. In the Southwest, by contrast, regionalist thought remained largely in the hands of novelists, literary scholars, and poets. That was especially so in northern New Mexico. Exiles, for the most part, from the Midwest or the East, New Mexico writers were that much more inclined to leave behind complicated social questions and to look for solace in seemingly primitive lives. The result was an absence of social depth. For all their reactionary nostalgia, the Nashville Agrarians never lost sight of socioeconomic concerns, and by the midthirties they had made at least a partial turn to rational planning. Meanwhile, writers and poets in New Mexico only deepened their fascination with the Indian pueblo and the Hispano village.22

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In short, southwestern regionalists remained largely uninterested in the problems of racial and material inequality, or even in the relationship, so central to the life of the folk, between oral tradition and economic production. Such concerns were not ignored everywhere in the Southwest. In Los Angeles, in Berkeley, and even in Albuquerque, they provoked considerable discussion. One contributor to the debate was Carey McWilliams, the Los Angeles literary and political critic. Raised on a northern Colorado ranch, McWilliams left for southern California at sixteen after the cattle market collapsed in the early twenties. Embittered by the arbitrary cruelty of “the system,” he nonetheless steered clear of political activism until the depression brought back memories of his family’s bankruptcy. Signs of his political awakening were already apparent in 1930, when he published a short but devastating critique of B. A. Botkin’s theory of literary regionalism. Botkin may have been the Southwest’s most energetic exponent of regional lore, but, McWilliams wrote, his regionalism only reflected the desire to flee “into the glamorous past.” Portraying in sentimental fashion the “pioneer types” of a bygone age, it overlooks “proletarian heroes of the modern age” and “shuns present problems.” 23 McWilliams looms large less for writing about northern New Mexico—his field of vision was always broader—than for contributing to a debate about race and wealth in the Southwest. His ideas can be situated in the southwestern flank of the American Popular Front, the social democratic movement of the 1930s that supported trade unionism, antifascism, and antiracism. He began in the mid-1930s with articles on migratory farmers and their protests, work that culminated in 1939 with Factories in the Fields. Following his service on the 1943 Sleepy Lagoon Defense Committee, a group formed to reverse the murder convictions of twenty-four ethnic Mexican youths in Los Angeles, he published a broader work of antiracism, Brothers Under the Skin. McWilliams was joined in the discussion of inequality by the social scientists Paul Taylor, Emory Bogardus, and Manual Gamio, each of whom studied issues of Mexican immigration and labor. New Mexico’s leading contributor was University of New Mexico education professor George I. Sánchez. Born in Albuquerque the same year as McWilliams, Sánchez drew on his own experience as a rural schoolteacher to study the underachievement of New Mexico’s Spanish-speaking students. During the 1930s, he became interested in the broader problem of entrenched inequality in the Rio Arriba, a problem he explored in the classic 1940 work, Forgotten People. The year before it was published he joined Arthur Campa, New Mexico

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folklorist and fellow faculty member, in organizing the national convention of El Congreso del Pueblo de Habla Español (Congress of Spanish-speaking Peoples), an organization that agitated for the welfare and civil rights of the Southwest’s Mexican-descent population.24 If the New Mexico regionalists overlooked the work of McWilliams or even Sánchez, they could not ignore the critical perspectives published in the New Mexico Quarterly. As the chief organ of the state’s regionalist sentiment, the Quarterly was not the most likely venue for social criticism. Its editor, Pearce, doubled as an evangelist of the exotic Southwest and an earnest devotee of Santa Fe writers. Mary Austin in particular caught his eye, and he spent much of his career tracing her literary biography.25 Captivated by lore and local color, Pearce kept the Quarterly free of controversy until 1935. That year, responding to the tenacity of the depression, he solicited several views on the “economic side of the regional movement.” The first to appear, Dudley Wynn’s “The Southwest Regional Straddle,” claimed that New Mexico writers and poets were lost in “futile romanticism.” The problem, Wynn wrote, was their straddling of past and present, their unwillingness to consider the lives of Indians or Hispanos in relation to the Anglo- dominated economy. Sealing their writing off from the world of commerce and power, the regionalists had no program for protecting in life those values they extolled in print. “[W]hen the devotee of beauty rides out in his automobile to collect Spanish folk-songs,” Wynn wrote, “he must give some thought to the automobile as well as the folk-song. For unless some thinking is done about automobiles, in a short while there won’t be any folk-songs.” 26 Close on Wynn’s heels came the still more damning attack by the left-wing writer Kyle Crichton, whose sojourn in New Mexico in the 1920s bred a lifelong, if ambivalent, interest in the Southwest. Like a number of migrants to New Mexico, Crichton moved to the upper Rio Grande to overcome pulmonary disease. Falling “under the spell of Southwestern romance,” he eagerly joined the attack on Katharine Gerould’s heretical article in 1926. Yet after returning to New York in 1929 and taking a job at Collier’s and the New Masses, he began to rethink what he had seen. Indians and paisanos, once simply elements of local color, began to bear in his eyes the suspicious marks of inequality and social trauma. In May 1935 he published in the Quarterly “Cease Not Living,” an indictment of the willful parochialism he found pervading southwestern regionalism. Insularity, he argued, developed naturally from the writers’ flight from matters of political economy: “To under-

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stand the Indian and learn from him was admirable enough, but to believe that machine civilization could be evaded by retreating into the kiva was never anything but nonsense.” Worse than fanciful, any such retreat had practical consequences, particularly for los paisanos. “I am violently opposed,” he announced, “to any policy which seeks to bind them to a dead past or which attempts to make them exceptions to the course of history. Thus, “[t]he Santa Fe idea of Spain redivivus is not only fantastic but disastrous.” 27

The Sustenance of Hispano Lore Pearce’s reply was telling. Referring obliquely to New York City, he portrayed Crichton as naive to the dangers of “standardization” and hopelessly out of touch with northern New Mexico’s seemingly distinctive rhythms. “Mr. Crichton says to us, ‘Cease to live in the past,’” Pearce wrote, “but he cannot by words say to the past, ‘Cease to live in us.’” Pearce’s sense of “us,” the enlightened southwesterners, was shaped in good measure by the new literary depiction of los paisanos. By the midthirties, in keeping with the celebration of a Spanish folk at the Santa Fe Fiesta and in the arts revival, poets and novelists were presenting nativos through an organic motif. In inspiration, in form, and in substance, the new writing appeared to grow out of the soil los paisanos cultivated. It was straightforward, built of simple rhetoric and powerful imagery, and it presented farmers and herders as embodiments of village lore. Approaching Botkin’s ideal of a bridge between folklore and high art, each book or poem represented the regionalists’ attempt to mediate the inherited wisdom of los paisanos to a broad English-speaking audience.28 Supporting and sustaining the new writing, giving it flesh and blood, was a treasure trove of accounts of paisano life and lore. In the teens and twenties, Anglo women in Santa Fe took up the hobby of “securing” fragile manuscripts and transcribing oral accounts of the legends, dramas, songs, customs, and beliefs that had long circulated in Hispano villages. The collectors’ favorite genre was the folk drama. Consisting of historical and religious plays, including “Los Comanches,” “Los Pastores,” “Las Posadas,” and “El Niño Perdido,” the dramas, reconstructed from multiple sources and always staged by Hispano players, seemed to reanimate the spirit of colonial times, or even that of sixteenth-century Europe.29 In 1935 the gathering of lore was accelerated and structured

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by the federal government. Under the auspices of the Works Progress Administration, employees of the New Mexico Federal Writers’ Project were dispatched to secluded villages to uncover whatever fragments of folk wisdom they could set on paper. The rationale for such work was not dissimilar to concerns shared by self-conscious regionalists of the South and Southwest. Administered by writers throughout the nation, the Federal Writers’ Project was imbued with anxieties about the state of industrial America. Depression-related talk of “excess capacity” and an “overbuilt” economy reinforced long-standing, if vague, fears that a mechanized American society had become hostile to the delicate growth of folklife.30 Although the folklore project was directed by Anglos, Hispanos proved the more resourceful field-workers. Reyes M. Martínez (working in Arroyo Hondo), Aurora Lucero-White (in and around Las Vegas), Simeón Tejada (Taos), and Lorin Brown (Cordova) drew on their familiarity with village proverbs, songs, and tales of witchcraft to gather a stunning collection of oral accounts.31 In fact, it was folklore, rather than political or economic matters, that so often anchored Hispanos’ own writing about the upper Rio Grande. Old Spain in Our Southwest, for example, was based on Nina Otero-Warren’s independent research into village legends, songs, and religious customs. Setting aside her considerable knowledge of party politics and public education, Otero-Warren chose to represent northern New Mexico with such tales as “The Bells of Santa Cruz” and “The Clown of San Cristóbal.” Lucero-White presents an even starker case. Born in 1893, the daughter of Antonio Lucero was well known in the Democratic Party and in suffragist circles in the 1910s. Throughout the twenties she served as an educator, government worker, and advocate for the teaching of Spanish. Then, in the thirties, she turned to Hispano lore. Today she is remembered less for her politics than for her insight into songs and folk dances “of the Spanish colonials.” 32 The two authors’ treatments of folklore inevitably blended a colonial past into the present day. “There is a distinctive rhythm in the Spanish folk music of New Mexico,” Otero-Warren wrote. “[I]t is an expression of the character of the people[,] . . . [an] expression of joy or sorrow that has been told in song for the past four centuries.” Village lore seemed to turn fields and pastures into a mythic homeland. “[T]he descendants of the Conquistadores,” she noted, “still feel that [northern New Mexico] is an ‘echo of Spain across the seas.’” 33 Lucero-White was more scholarly and subtle than Otero-Warren, but she was no less con-

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cerned with defining paisano lore as distinctively Spanish colonial. During the 1930s, she became concerned that village fiestas were suffering not just from the insults of modernization but from a menace originating south of the border. Beyond the automobile and the radio, she wrote in 1936, “[t]here is still another influence which threatens the traditional features of the New Mexican fiesta—the Mexican influence.” The sister republic, having herself discarded the traditional Spanish folk elements, wishes to impose upon us her more recently discovered Indian folk elements. We believe that . . . each should be accorded its proper place. The Indian (Aztec) folk heritage properly belongs in Mexico; New Mexico should cling to its Spanish folk traditions.34

No author clung as doggedly as Aurelio Espinosa. More than other students of the upper Rio Grande, Espinosa strove assiduously throughout his life to document a dominant Spanish influence. Although the erudite Stanford professor remained at some distance from the day-today events of the Spanish revival, his scholarly publications between 1907 and 1955, based on field research and his early life in southern Colorado, served as an intellectual touchstone for the more popular and lyrical writers. Amateur collectors readily cited his work. Mary Austin in particular appears to have borrowed directly from his 1911 claim, often embellished in her own writing, that the conquistadors brought to New Mexico the language of the Siglo del Oro, the same linguistic forms refined by Cervantes, Lope de Vega, and Calderón. “[N]o influence whatever has come to disturb the slow development of this original Castilian treasure,” Espinosa wrote. “[It] remains to-day as it was brought here in the seventeenth century, a Spanish linguistic monument, which no influence or power can ever destroy.” Espinosa found a still deeper Spanish imprint in the Rio Arriba’s folklore. In the region’s corridos (ballads), décimas (riddles), versos (popular verse), dichos (proverbs), and cuentos (tales), the linguist discovered what he took to be the richest remnant of early modern Spain, a survival stronger in fact than anything preserved in Spain itself. Head and shoulders above all forms was the verso, the single-strophe saying that embodied the “feelings and ideas of the Spanish people,” the “real character of the Spanish race.” 35 It is tempting to regard such rhetoric as the fancy of the elite. To be sure, none of the authors tried to hide their claims to a distinguished heredity. Lucero-White, for example, proclaimed in her WPA résumé her descent from Antonio de Godoy, a Spanish captain of New Mexico in 1650, and the Spaniard Juan Romero de Roblero. Espinosa’s sense

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of distinction was still more piquant. In 1936, following the publication of Ortega y Gassett’s Revolt of the Masses, he published in the New Mexico Quarterly a short diatribe titled “The Revolt of the Ignorant.” In it Espinosa warned readers to beware those who no longer defer to people of education. He asked plaintively whether an educated elite, “in spite of the violent struggle going on to democratize and ‘socialize’ all human life,” could in the end triumph over “the rule of the mob.” 36 It is worth noting, however, that students of folklore far less prominent than Espinosa, Otero-Warren, or Lucero-White also invoked Spanish colonial antecedents, albeit in less dramatic fashion. Lorin W. Brown, for example, spoke of “the inherent love of the soil” he shared with his northern New Mexico neighbors and described “the land their forefathers fought so hard to reclaim and hold.” Having worked the same land for generations, the region’s farmers, Brown maintained, are unlike most people in the United States, “for the Spanish colonists here came a generation earlier than the Pilgrims.” What Brown shared with the elite was the fear that all nativos, steadily losing ground to the Anglo, might soon be dismissed as mere “Mexicans.” To secure their places in New Mexico society, the gentry turned back to the ideal of the Spanish patrón, the figure who at once stood among and above los paisanos. 37 No one better represented the loss and nostalgia of the Hispano gentry than Cleofas Jaramillo. Sister of Reyes Martínez, daughter of the Rio Arriba’s best-known family, Jaramillo watched her life fall into disarray soon after her celebrated marriage in 1898. The death of two children, the loss of her husband, Venceslao, in 1917, and the terrifying rape and murder of her daughter in 1931 took place against the backdrop of social and family decline. As early as 1912, while visiting her childhood home in the Taos valley, she discovered the houses of her former neighbors in ruins, their owners selling off valuables to stay solvent. “This is how our rich Spanish families have been stripped of their precious possessions,” she remembered years later, after she, too, was forced to dispose of her ranch and all its property. Moving to a small house in Santa Fe, she began to recognize the broader forces that shaped her life. In Shadows of the Past, her 1941 recounting of the lore of her childhood, Jaramillo described how New Mexico’s “rich Spanish Dons” were overwhelmed by an invasion of aggressive and shrewd Anglos. “Land grants and business properties passed into the hands of the stranger for minimum sums,” she wrote. “In their sad, humbled state, the families of the Dons retired into the background, holding to the small possessions they had left.” 38 Jaramillo herself did not go quietly. Turning to “Spanish” folklore,

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she found a kind of leverage against those Anglos who would encroach on her field of knowledge. In 1936, angered by an ill-informed magazine article by Elizabeth DeHuff, she organized La Sociedad Folklorica, an organization dedicated to preserving “Spanish” customs. Composed of thirty Hispanas, the society met regularly to swap folktales and hold a fashion show of “Old Spanish style” dresses during the Fiesta. Its members also traveled to villages in northern New Mexico to gather songs and poems of the “viejos,” or old ones, before they were forgotten. Figuratively speaking, La Sociedad Folklorica created an enclosed space in which elite Hispanas could resurrect a fond past in full view of Fiesta crowds. Her publications served a like purpose. By putting her memories in print, as she did first in 1939 with Cuentos de Hogar, a collection of twenty-five folktales told by her mother, and again in 1941 with Shadows of the Past, Jaramillo counteracted those “smart Americans” out to “make money with their writing.” 39 Modern-day critics have found in Jaramillo’s life and writing the dilemma faced by several elite Spanish-speaking writers. Jaramillo, Otero-Warren, and Lucero-White all had to negotiate a cultural terrain pockmarked by losses of land, property, and social status. In recent years the scholarly opinion of the paths they chose has softened. Accused at one point of lapsing into a romantic and accommodationist “hacienda literature” that naively ignored Anglo domination, they are today credited for preserving a disappearing way of life, not to mention a voice for female writers. Or, at the very least, they are recognized for maintaining an ambivalent stance toward the new Anglo order, one that combined moments of acquiescence with “whispers of resistance.” Yet the impact of any such resistance must be judged in the broader context of literary production. Whatever Jaramillo and her Spanish-speaking sisters say to today’s scholars, it is clear that their contributions in the thirties had already been overshadowed by Anglo writers of the regionalist persuasion. The sway of that persuasion was never so clear as in the depiction of northern New Mexico’s most talked-about phenomenon, the religious ceremonies of Los Hermanos Penitentes.40

The Medieval Village Formally known as the Brotherhood of Our Father Jesus, the Penitentes are members of a confraternity that observes Catholic devotions and renders service to communities in northern New Mexico and southern

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Colorado.41 At its height the brotherhood comprised numerous independent chapters throughout the Rio Arriba. Each had up to fifty common members and about a dozen officers, whose duties were laid out in elaborate constitutions. Although membership fell throughout the twentieth century, a decided majority of Hispano men took part before 1900, with as many as 95 percent of adult males in each village organized into some two hundred chapters.42 Precisely what the Penitentes did has often been misunderstood. Outsiders have tended to fixate on their penitential exercises during the Christian Holy Week, exercises that once involved substantial self-flagellation and physical pain. On Holy Tuesday new initiates entered a two-room retreat (morada), where an officer (sangrador) made several lengthwise cuts in their backs with flints or broken glass. To honor the sufferings of Christ, the Brothers then received fifty-five lashes, or as many as they could tolerate before fainting. On Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, they observed the fourteen Stations of the Cross between the morada and a designated Calvario. Along the way they frequently beat themselves with cactus branches and braided whips (disciplinas) and in some cases bore a huge wooden cross (madero). On Good Friday the procession sometimes ended with the simulated crucifixion of the Cristo, a brother selected for the honor. The young man was tied to a cross with leather straps and raised into an upright position, where he remained for about thirty minutes (less if he lost consciousness).43 Hispano villagers did not ignore the drama of these devotions. Yet as neighbors and kin, they viewed the Brothers in a less sensational light. In their minds the Brotherhood was first and foremost a pillar of a community’s deep Catholic faith. During Holy Week, for example, women and unaffiliated men also assembled periodically in the morada to pray and sing hymns. Some villagers attended services without shoes or crawled there on bloodied knees. Between 1932 and 1946 Andrés Mora walked several miles from his village of Escabosa to the morada at Chilili every Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday of Holy Week. Although not himself a Penitente, he and others followed behind the penitential procession to the designated Calvario, stopping as necessary for prayer. Looking back from 1975, Manuel Martínez of Rociada, born in about 1890, remembered a very active Brotherhood during his youth. “We lived so well, all in harmony and honesty and serving God. . . . It was a big thing for all the people. The people had much, much faith. All that is finished now.” 44 But Holy Week was not the only time neighbors encountered the Brotherhood. Throughout the year it served as each

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town’s principal benevolent organization. In times of distress or death, it ministered to physical and spiritual needs, singing hymns, feeding the hungry, caring for orphans, or even digging a grave. “I was a member,” recalled ninety-year-old Luis Bustos in 1975. “The faith we all have being Catholics and helping each other out in times of need are part of our tradition. . . . The people worked united, not isolated here and there like they do today.” 45 Such nuances ordinarily escaped the many Anglo Protestants who described New Mexico to a national audience in the nineteenth century. Missionaries and sensation-seeking journalists took the lead in declaring that barbarism was afoot in northern New Mexico. The pronouncements only grew more numerous and mean-spirited after the railroad’s arrival in 1880. A hailstorm of derogation portrayed the Brothers not just as backward and uncivilized, but as “fanatics,” “horsethieves,” “highwaymen,” and “murderers.” 46 Observing the penance of a Taos chapter of “rascals” in 1895, one writer conveyed his sense of total dislocation. “They were like a pack of mad beasts rather than human beings,” Warren M’Veigh wrote, “and all this in the nineteenth century, within three days’ ride of New York City.” 47 To make the apparent depravity comprehensible to a larger American audience, observers described the Brothers in the familiar parlance of race and wealth: they were low-order Mexicans. In George Wharton James’s description, the “Mexican” Penitentes were “degenerate and cowardly,” their leader a “low-browed, dirty Mexican.” Similarly, Charles Lummis characterized the Penitentes he observed in 1889 in the village of San Mateo as “Mexicans” of the “lowest and most dangerous class.” Lummis’s encounter remains famous today largely because of the peril he described. While visiting at the home of Col. Manuel Chaves and his son Ireneo—his “wealthy and courtly Spanish friends”—Lummis, accompanied by Ireneo, secretly photographed the penitential devotions. When the pair was discovered, Ireneo brandished a revolver to keep the “evil-faced mob” at bay.48 The irresistibly repellent depiction of the Brotherhood maintained its place in published accounts until World War I. After 1920, even as journalists from outside New Mexico persisted in describing the lurid and macabre,49 the tone in the state lost its hard edge. “After all has been said, the fact remains,” wrote El Palacio in 1920, “that the ritual and songs of the Penitente Brothers are deeply devotional[,] . . . an earnest attempt to visualize the gripping drama” of the Christian Holy Week. The New Mexico Federal Writers’ Project followed suit. It endeavored to present the Brothers’ case “as it really is and not as it has

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been misrepresented so often.” One WPA writer speculated that the much-pitied Penitentes might “attain an exaltation and peace with God unknown to those who pity them.” 50 A new empathy also surfaced in the rhetoric and rituals of tourism. Along with the opportunity to see the Penitentes “scourge themselves until the blood runs,” tourists were promised an artistic and enlightening religious drama, an old passion play on a par with Oberammergau. As travel articles invited visitors to return to the “Middle Ages” or a “bit of sixteenth-century Spain,” the Fred Harvey Company issued a postcard depicting a morada as a “survival from medieval times.” Even the old-time sport of “Penitente Hunting” changed. By the mid-1920s, the practice of sneaking through piñon trees to catch sight of bloody bodies was supplemented by organized and respectful meetings of Penitente chapters and genteel visitors. In 1923, for example, Gov. James F. Hinkle, accompanied by Dana Johnson and Frank Applegate, attended the ceremonies at Abiquiu and even conducted the village’s dramatic tinieblas ceremony, a clamorous ritual observed in a pitch-black morada. 51 The rhetoric of medievalism, a new-old way of talking and thinking about the Penitentes, found its strongest support in the work of two New Mexico regionalists, Alice Corbin Henderson and Raymond Otis. The pair stand out even among the talented interwar writers inspired by the Penitentes, a set that includes Mary Austin, Robert Bright, and the artful Fray Angelico Chavez.52 In Henderson’s and Otis’s evocative writing, the depraved and fanatical “Mexican” became the humble Spanish supplicant, the fervent bearer of a mystical yet rejuvenating faith rooted deep in the Middle Ages. Nourished by the soil of the secluded village, the Brothers’ simple belief exhorted an overcivilized America to change its misguided ways. Consider Otis’s 1933 article, “Medievalism in America.” Lacking cinema, telephones, and all modern conveniences, Otis wrote, the Penitentes live “without outlets and without amusements. There is only the soil, and a grudging desolate soil it is, upon which they may work out their destinies.” Henderson agreed. In her Indian Detours pamphlet of 1928 she drew attention to the “medieval atmosphere of the Spanish villages” and the “medieval symbols of atonement brought to this country by the first Spanish settlers.” Beyond the medieval imagery, what makes Otis and Henderson especially noteworthy is the disjuncture between their prose and their civic commitments. Neither writer was a bohemian escapist. Yet neither could transcend the conviction, so common to the regionalist circle, that the villagers’ future lay in the redemptive inheritance of land and faith.53 Henderson was among New Mexico’s great literary talents of the

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interwar period. Arriving in Santa Fe in 1916 to recuperate from tuberculosis, she found much more than physical respite. Though forced to leave her editing duties at Poetry, the Chicago journal, she immediately set to work building her own creative community. Highly adept at persuading leading poets to visit or move to Santa Fe, among them Carl Sandburg, Vachel Lindsey, Robert Frost, Witter Bynner, and Arthur Davidson Ficke, Henderson earned the reputation as the centerpiece of the Santa Fe literary scene. Like so many of her contemporaries, she drew immediate inspiration from northern New Mexico’s diverse peoples, in particular from the distance, of space and time, she perceived between them and an urban, Anglo-Saxon America.54 In 1920 she presented that inspiration in Red Earth, a collection of fifty-seven short poems whose everyday images of Santa Fe’s Hispano and Indian life—a wood seller and his burros, a pottery maker—seemed to transcend the banality of the more worldly city. In “On the Acequia Madre,” for example, she portrayed the solemn dignity of a Catholic wake: And the old man with the grey stubby beard To whom death came Is stunned into silence Death is such a distinguished visitor Making even old flesh important.

As counterpoint to the scene’s quiet profundity she offered “Four O’Clock in the Afternoon,” her impression of New York City. Four o’clock in the afternoon. . . . A stream of money is flowing down Fifth Avenue. They speak of the fascination of New York Climbing aboard motor-busses to look down on the endless play From the Bay to the Bronx But it is forever the same: There is no life there.55

The verses of Red Earth conjure a poet more fascinated by the appearances of her subjects—their postures, movements, and fit with their settings—than the complexities of their lives. That she marveled at the captivating rhythms and “serenity” of a woodcutter and his burro suggests a degree of detachment from his daily struggles. Henderson was not in fact ignorant of local political debates. In 1922, as a leader of the New Mexico Association of Indian Affairs, she took a primary role in agitating against the Bursum Bill, and in 1926 she was among the first

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residents to speak out against the Culture Center. Yet like so many of her regionalist colleagues, Henderson had difficulty rendering nonwhites in more than formal, symbolic terms. In her conception their lives took on the character of a dramatic performance, one that acted out the sentiments at the heart of the regionalist persuasion. That was particularly true of Los Hermanos Penitentes.56 During the 1920s, Henderson and her husband, the artist William Penhallow Henderson, joined the annual Holy Week pilgrimage of prominent Santa Feans to Abiquiu. In 1937 she captured her experiences in Brothers of Light, a luminous evocation of the town’s Lenten ceremonies. Earning both contemporary praise and lasting recognition,57 the book succeeded largely by transforming the Abiquiu Brothers from ordinary villagers into players in a drama of striking beauty, warm benevolence, and unflinching religious devotion. Henderson opens the account with a description of the Abiquiu setting as an “amphitheater,” a “stretch of sun-bleached soil” of the Rio Grande Valley lying beneath red cliffs and blue snowcapped peaks. As she proceeds, the beautifully austere land and the lives of its inhabitants begin to merge. “[If ] the creed of the people is harsh, so too is the soil. The life of the people, wrung from an arid soil dependent upon wind and chance, is overcast with somber fatalism.” Yet the severity their lives is balanced, Henderson tells us, by the warm embrace of the village itself. If death is ever present, so, too, are watchful leaders who keep the Brothers’ exercises within the limits of their endurance. Thus the Brotherhood’s Hermano Mayor is “[w]hite-haired and gentle,” a fair and kind leader of his flock with the “finely drawn aristocratic features of the paintings of El Greco or Velasquez.” Finally there are the Brothers themselves. Humble and utterly devoted to God, they appear not as individuals but as the common bearers of an unswerving faith, one that, despite its extraordinary aspect in Abiquiu, remains “deeply rooted and closely interwoven in the texture of the lives of the Spanish people of New Mexico.” 58 In his 1935 attack on the regionalist disposition, Kyle Crichton complained that he had never read a meaningful discussion of the Brotherhood. Nobody, he argued, had ever explained what the Lenten ceremonies meant to the Brothers themselves, or why the fraternity had survived for so long in New Mexico. To Henderson, writing two years later, a Spanish inheritance supplied meaning enough. Abiquiu’s Penitentes, she explained, represented a “genuine Old-World survival” brought to New Mexico by the “leading citizens and ‘great swells’ of the Re-Conquest.” Yet not even colonial Spain contained them, for the

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path of their descent, traced backward to its origins, disappeared somewhere in the mists of medieval Europe. Despite the passage of centuries, the imprint of the medieval age still transfigured its faithful adherents. “The clock of time had mysteriously turned back,” she thought on seeing a row of kneeling and prostrate men, all quietly chanting. “This was not the United States or the Twentieth Century, but the heart of the Middle Ages.” 59 Spanish medievalism was worn more lightly but no less consequentially in Raymond Otis’s Miguel of the Bright Mountain. More finely textured than Henderson’s portrait, Otis’s 1936 novel depicted the struggles of Hormiga, a fictional village patterned after Truchas, whose separation from the outside world is as great as the passage “from medievalism to modernity.” Yet Hormiga is far from Henderson’s blissful Abiquiu. Amid its crumbling adobe walls, poverty is everywhere, and hunger is “far from unknown.” The town’s future, and its ambivalent link to the outer world, is personified in Otis’s young protagonist, Miguel López. In struggling against daily deprivations, Miguel faces a question that undoubtedly confronted many young men between the wars: whether to remain in the village, supported by kin and the Brotherhood, or to leave home for good and make one’s way on the outside. The difficult dilemma paralleled the tension Otis faced in his own life. During his years in northern New Mexico, lasting from 1927 to his premature death in 1938, the writer struggled to reconcile his sentimental attachment to secluded and picturesque Hispano villages with his practical political inclinations. On the one hand, he envisioned the Rio Arriba village as a refuge from machine civilization. Like Henderson he found the clearest sign of decline in New York City. There, Otis wrote, “mankind is surpassing his finiteness and reaching beyond his spirituality.” Should he go “one step too far,” the writer warned, he will “plunge into destruction.” It was in places such as Truchas and Chimayo that Otis found revitalization, and indeed a permanent resting place: his ashes were scattered on the winding road between the two towns.60 Yet Otis was hardly blind to the villagers’ everyday struggles with poverty and hunger, or to the ways the more powerful patrones swindled impoverished and illiterate farmers. Nor did he overlook the possibility of building political coalitions that spanned town and county boundaries. He worked closely with the Liga Obrera de Habla Español, a workers’ union of farmers, laborers, and miners that came under attack for its alleged communist sympathies. He also led the Committee on Spanish-American Affairs, a group that assisted Hispano farmers in

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the fight against the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy Project, an irrigation and drainage program that imposed assessments on landowners. Otis argued that the farmers, many of whose holdings amounted to less than ten acres, could never raise the surplus to sustain their families, much less to pay the assessments.61 The tension between realism and nostalgia lies at the heart of Miguel. One gets the feeling that Otis deliberately charted a course away from romantic portrayals. Residents of Hormiga, having lost their farming and grazing lands, struggle daily against multiple social ills. As they fall into petty squabbles, they are fleeced by Hormiga’s local merchantpolitico, Don Vicente Romero. Nor is the Brotherhood Hormiga’s salvation. Miguel, one of the few characters who sees things as they are, recognizes the value of Holy Week atonement for the town’s “wickedness,” but he also questions the fraternity’s rigid adherence to “ancient compulsions.” Drawn into the morada at a young age, men remain in the village throughout their lives, blind to the needs of their wives and children. Here Otis’s use of “Mexican” and “Spanish” is telling. After Miguel leaves his “Mexican” family for Gabaldon (Santa Fe), he finds that the city’s “Spanish” population has abandoned itself to abject pursuits. Just as “vote-hungry politicians” pander to “Spanish-Americans” at election time, the city people use the label to give their iniquitous lives a false esteem. Like Carey McWilliams, whose pathbreaking North from Mexico did not appear for another decade, Otis tied “SpanishAmerican” to a distinctively southwestern false consciousness.62 Yet his realism went only so far. Miguel finds no virtue in the empty pursuits of Anglo-dominated Gabaldon. To recover his moral bearing, he returns to Hormiga. “I thought you were an American now—I thought you didn’t like the Penitentes,” his father says. “I hate Americans,” Miguel replies. “I want to join the Penitentes.” He does that, and after a cleansing penance he and his new wife leave Hormiga, for Anglo influence is appearing even there, and retreat into the mountains. On an undeveloped land grant, faithful to agrarian tradition, he makes his living from the soil. To Otis, Miguel’s escape represented the triumph of piety over moral dissolution. Moving into the wilderness, away from Anglo corruption, Miguel returns to the world of those who first wrested the land from Indian tribes. Although his circumstances foretell a life of hard labor, one lacking even the meager compensations of Hormiga, he finds salvation in the ways of the folk. As a Penitente and a farmer, he overcomes the emptiness of the American century.63 The utopian conclusion of Miguel encapsulates the challenges con-

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fronting southwestern regionalism. In attacking machine civilization, even the more thoughtful regionalists fell back on the reassuring folkways of the village and walled it off from the world outside. Poets and novelists, of course, are not generally expected to identify practical solutions to difficult social dilemmas. Yet their writing creates and reinforces the terms by which people conceive of political action. In interwar New Mexico, the regionalist portrayal of Hispanos made its political mark by rendering itself apolitical. That was the ultimate meaning of Paul Walter’s prophecy. Honoring Hispanos as the bearers of folk tradition, consigning them to an enriching past, the regionalist persuasion portrayed them and their attendant struggles as outside the practical realm of political discussion and even outside the flow of history itself. What made that depiction possible, of course, was the Hispano’s transcendent Spanish inheritance. In redeeming the “Mexican,” a Spanish past also lifted the long-disparaged paisano out of the domain of political surveillance and attack. Borne into the realm of the colonial folk, his struggles were rendered natural, a feature of New Mexico’s vast and unchanging landscape, and he himself ceased to carry historical weight.

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Conclusion The Coronado Cuarto Centennial and the Depletion of Spanish Heritage

A journey into the past in New Mexico is just around the next bend of the road; a flashing streamlined train may cast a shadow on a church two centuries old; a 1940 passenger car may follow trails that are older than history. . . . Ancient customs and hoary traditions still prevail, practically unchanged by the aggressive tempo of the twentieth century. Coronado Cuarto Centennial Exposition, May 2, 1940, CCC-RC

Even as Raymond Otis wrote of secluded Hispano villages, he recognized all too well that they were changing. As radio programs and advertisements oriented villagers to faraway places, new goods and objects altered their everyday lives. Characteristic of the changes was the motor vehicle. In the early 1930s the automobile and the santo, two seemingly irreconcilable objects, lay at the center of village life, one a token of tradition, the other a conveyer and symbol of change, a harbinger of things to come. It is therefore more than a little ironic that the automobile became instrumental by decade’s end in commemorating the upper Rio Grande’s Spanish past. In pursuit of tourist dollars, state officials decided early in the decade to stage the 1940 Coronado Cuarto Centennial Exposition, a statewide tribute to Francisco Vásquez de Coronado’s exploration of the Southwest in 1540. Although Coronado worked his way north by foot and horse, the 1940 event relied on cars and trucks. Lacking a city large enough to accommodate anticipated crowds, the expo217

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sition was designed deliberately to spread them out. Its principal attraction was the Coronado Entrada, a series of dramatic pageants performed on a huge mobile stage and towed throughout the state. Places unvisited by the rolling show put on their own festivals: rodeos, town fairs, religious feasts, and heroic remembrances, all of which were devised to disperse visitors widely, thereby maximizing sales of gasoline, food, and overnight lodging.1 The auto-centered exposition marked both the culmination and the end of the Spanish revival. In name and principle, the Cuarto Centennial paid tribute to multiple strands of the upper Rio Grande’s modern Spanish heritage. As the summer of 1940 approached, Spanish colonial art and architecture, village folkways, and the Santa Fe Fiesta were all brought into the promotional spotlight. Tying each strand to Coronado’s entrada of 1540, the exposition drew attention to the common origin of seemingly distinct endeavors. It told tourists that a Spanish colonial past still lived on the narrow streets of Santa Fe, Truchas, and Taos. Yet as a commercial enterprise, one capacious enough to include the Clovis Billy the Kid festival and the Lovington “Cattle Story,” the exposition suggested that the heritage was losing its crucial social function. Since the turn of the century, attracting tourists had been but one function of Spanish colonial symbolism. The broader purpose was to express social distinction, to mark off the comforting realm of the “Spanish colonial” from the unpleasant image of the “Mexican.” Yet by 1940, colonial memories were growing irrelevant to an increasingly Anglo society with its own markers of social status. As more and more newcomers arrived from Topeka and Oklahoma City, the upper Rio Grande’s Spanish past was steadily devolving into a light, floating point of reference, a diffuse allusion depleted of substantial meaning. The Coronado Cuarto Centennial Exposition of 1940 was born of hard times. As the mining and livestock industries bottomed out in the early thirties, state officials quickly recognized the potential promise of automobile tourism. Building on the promotional campaign initiated in 1931 by New Mexico, the tourist magazine, officials distributed guides and maps, built roadside markers, and advertised the state in publications such as Colliers, the New Yorker, and the Saturday Evening Post. The efforts paid off in the decade’s middle years. In 1934, the year after mining and livestock accounted for no more than $40 million of revenue, an estimated 1.8 million tourists spent $51 million. In 1935 the number of visitors climbed to 2.7 million, more than four times the state’s pop-

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ulation and roughly twice the annual number of people who toured southern California (though many of the visitors were travelers bound for the West Coast). The tourism strategy was further developed by Clyde Tingley, governor of New Mexico from 1935 to 1939. Friendly with President Roosevelt, Tingley was adept at acquiring New Deal funds for improving state highways, the most important of which, U.S. Route 66, was completed in 1937. Convinced that tourism was the state’s industry of the future, Tingley consolidated separate promotional efforts in the New Mexico Tourist Bureau, which pitched New Mexico aggressively as America’s “Land of Enchantment.” 2 The keystone of Tingley’s strategy was a Coronado commemoration. Bringing the plan to the state legislature shortly after taking office, the governor reckoned that New Mexico could attract visitors in record numbers by augmenting its most popular attractions—tourists repeatedly cited “mountains” and “Indians”—with a dramatic historical event. By recalling Coronado’s 1540 quest for gold, New Mexico would remind visitors of a moment of virility and heroism more dramatic than the period’s competing attractions, namely Chicago’s 1934 Century of Progress and the Golden Gate International Exposition and New York World’s Fair, both held in 1939. At the very least, New Mexico would top Texas, which was making plans to celebrate its mere centennial in 1936. All in all, the Coronado idea seemed unassailable. According to the director of the Tourist Bureau, “Coronado was unsuccessful in his search, but the celebration that honors his journey in 1940 should mean gold for New Mexico.” 3 Roadblocks soon appeared, however. The first was financial: state lawmakers, many representing areas far from the main highways, remained cool to the proposal’s $750,000 price tag. Even after the newly formed Cuarto Centennial Commission warned that New Mexico would be the “laughing stock” of the nation if plans fell through, the legislature initially refused to appropriate a single dollar. Turning to the federal government, at first without success, the desperate commission made some headway only after it brought up the Roosevelt administration’s Good Neighbor program. Claiming that “a large portion of New Mexico is Spanish in blood and thinking,” commission president James Zimmerman observed that the event would promote a “spiritual relationship with our sister nations in this hemisphere.” The amount of $200,000 was eventually appropriated.4 What remained unclear was how the Cuarto Centennial should be celebrated. After considerable debate, the commission adopted a theme of authenticity and education. Rather than stage a “commercial expo-

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sition” on par with the fairs in Chicago and Texas, it approved a program to enlighten all manner of visitors. Those of scholarly bent were served with museum exhibits, colloquiums of southwestern scholarship, and the publication of eleven historical monographs on the Spanish colonial period. The less scholarly tourist was treated to an abundance of folk festivals. To disperse visitors throughout the state, the commission called on roughly 175 towns to put on exhibitions of fiddling, folk songs, storytelling, and square dancing—anything, in other words, that fit the category of local lore. All visitors were encouraged to take in the exposition’s centerpiece, its mobile historical drama. Written and directed by pageant virtuoso and Santa Fe Fiesta veteran Thomas Wood Stevens, the performance involved more than twenty thousand players and a three-hundred-foot-long portable stage. The drama was divided into eighteen historical acts, each of which, presented in a different location, depicted a separate chapter of Coronado’s trek.5 With such a mobilization of people and capital, Stevens could hardly portray Coronado in less than heroic light. He could not, for example, reenact the Spaniard’s plunder of the Pueblo village of Tiguex and the slaughter of its occupants, many of whom were burned at the stake. The director instead echoed the larger message of the exposition: Coronado was an intrepid explorer and “protective” colonizer who overcame misfortune to save the Southwest for Church and Crown. Coronado and his men, commission member Erna Fergusson wrote, “staged one of the great adventurous exploits of history. And they were followed, through three centuries, by other conquerors and colonizers; brave men and women who spread the Spanish folk, their faith and their language so widely and rooted them so deeply that they modify the life of the entire Southwest even today [sic].” That claim was familiar to a New Mexican audience. For the out- of-state visitor, she put it in simpler terms. The exposition presented “the arrival of the white man in the United States 400 years ago for permanent settlement.” Coronado, the exposition’s main promotional guide reiterated, “formed the basis for European civilization in the Southwest.” 6 The image of Coronado as noble civilizer quickly spread beyond the inner circle of exposition organizers. Preparing its readers for the summer festival, the Las Cruces Daily News recalled how Coronado had encountered Zuni warriors “hideous in paint and wild in determination.” The Socorro Chieftain remembered how “gallant . . . men of Spain, so brightly daring, so gaily courageous,” brought “the Flower of Spain” to New Mexico. One unexpected reservation to the hagiography was

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voiced by T. M. Pearce, the literature professor, committed regionalist, and, in this case, stickler for historical accuracy. Pearce argued that it was misleading at best to rank Coronado ahead of British colonists. Oñate, not Coronado, was the first Spanish colonizer of New Mexico, Pearce noted, and Oñate’s mission of 1598 was clearly preceded by the British settlement on Roanoke Island. Nonsense, replied the true believers. Pearce’s “disagreeable attitude,” wrote W. T. Sena, reflected the all-toocommon Anglophilic tendency to belittle Spanish achievements. The historian Agapito Rey likewise called colonial settlements on the East Coast “a heap of ruins” and argued that Coronado had brought a far more permanent civilization to the Southwest.7 The debate was no mere academic exercise. Seen as an adventurer or a buccaneer, Coronado embodied little more than individual heroism. He conquered and plundered but left nothing behind. Seen as the region’s first colonizer, he brought the seed of European civilization and gave life to multiple branches of the upper Rio Grande’s Spanish heritage. As 1940 approached, promotional pamphlets and articles repeatedly related Coronado to the new adobe architecture, to the Santa Fe Fiesta, and to Spanish colonial arts. In keeping with the exposition’s noncommercial and decentralized theme, the most celebrated expression of Spanish inheritance was the lore of the secluded village, its dances, fiestas, and religious plays. In Mora, as one press release noted, “the solemn and gay mingle in true reflection of the charm of the ancient Spanish heritage on which the community prides itself.” But in truth every Hispano village had something to offer. By simply heading down back roads, only a few miles from Santa Fe, visitors could go back several centuries. Here, one brochure promised, “where the customs that came with the first colonists to America are still observed, visitors get a glimpse of a different world.” No stage show or Hollywood spectacle, the village merely presented “the simple, old-worldish celebrations of a simple people.” 8 To the chagrin of organizers, precious few visitors seemed to notice. Neither folk festivals nor stage shows drew the anticipated crowds. In its postmortem the commission laid blame on the turbulent “national and international conditions” of 1940. A more likely culprit was indifference. Strategically composed of both Anglos and Hispanos, the commission worked hard to suggest that all residents were behind the festival, and it even chose the name “Cuarto Centennial” to combine “a touch of Spanish and English.” Yet the contrivance could not paper over the less-than-spirited disposition of New Mexico’s newest Anglos. In

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communities far from Route 66, growing numbers of Anglo cattle ranchers, miners, and oil drillers looked askance at a festival that celebrated a figure whose followers had long since had their day. Hence the legislature’s resistance to appropriating funds. As the New Mexican asked reproachfully, “Has the encroaching Texas element, alien to and often contemptuous of this [Hispano] tradition, so far dominated the state as to vitiate” all public interest? 9 Middle-class Hispanos were not ready to concede defeat. Throughout 1939 and 1940, organizations such as the Alianza HispanoAmericana, the Spanish American Normal School, and Santa Fe’s Sociedad Folklorica staged commemorative folk dramas and dances. Alongside the individual events, prominent figures exhorted nativos to reflect on the meaning of 1940. Commission Secretary Gilberto Espinosa called on all New Mexicans to honor the “sacrifices and heroic deeds of those who first set foot in New Mexico.” Fabiola Cabeza de Baca, niece of Ezéquiel C. de Baca and daughter of a once-prosperous eastern New Mexico rancher, regarded the exposition as a secure moment of reflection amid the sad pattern of twentieth-century change. “As we celebrate 400 years of our people on this soil,” she wrote, “let us not forget that the faith of our forefathers is the one thing that no one has been able to take away from us.” Even U.S. senator Dennis Chávez expressed his support. Although he later raised hackles by deliberately referring to his Spanish-speaking appointees as “Mexicans,” Chávez applauded Governor Tingley in 1938 for paying respect to “Spanish culture.” 10 Amid the expressions of reverence there arose one powerful voice of dissent. Throughout the 1930s, the folklorist Arthur Campa had gained local notice for criticizing the fixation on purely Spanish origins of Hispano lore. Drawing attention to Indian and Mexican influences, Campa called on his colleagues to break out of the Spanish “spell.” In 1939 he broadened and deepened his attack. In a series of essays in El Nuevo Mexicano, by then the leading organ of the fading Spanish-language press, Campa targeted the twin claims of racial and cultural purity. The elite notion of limpieza de sangre, unadulterated Spanish blood, was the easier mark. “What would [Coronado and Oñate] say,” Campa asked, “of that riotous preoccupation about Spanish origins, recalling, with a smile, that none of the great leaders brought a wife or family with him?” Fortunately, the young scholar wrote, the generation obsessed with “pure blood” was moving off the stage, and a new generation, more concerned with education and real social progress, was stepping on.

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The more challenging problem was the idea of a distinctively Spanish culture. Against the symbolism of Spanish heritage, Campa asserted the primacy of “Mexican culture,” a formation that combined without apology the contributions of Spanish and Indian ancestors, mixing them with ethnic Mexican influences of the present day. Rather than strain for Spanish colonial distinctiveness, he argued, Hispanos should embrace a vibrant and eclectic Mexican heritage.11 Campa’s position stimulated a discussion among Hispanos that continues, in one form or another, to this day. With respect to New Mexico’s political economy, however, the debate was a little beside the point. After 1940 the state was secularly under Anglo control. After accounting for roughly 70 percent of all New Mexicans in 1900 and just over 52 percent through the early 1930s, Hispanos fell into minority status no later than 1940.12 Having long since asserted their economic sway, Anglos now had the luxury to ignore the Hispano past, however it was defined. That sentiment was readily visible at the Coronado exposition. Not surprisingly, organizers had no use for Campa’s “Mexican” heritage. Though they advertised links to “sister republics of Spanish origin,” they avoided mention of Mexico itself. Yet neither did they regard New Mexico’s “Spanish past” as much more than a tourist attraction. Even as they recalled the beginnings of European civilization in the United States, organizers emphasized the need to look toward the future. The celebration must “look into the past,” they said, but it should not “look to the past.” It must not ignore the “later comers of many stocks” who would inhabit the Southwest during the coming four centuries. In other words, Coronado’s memorable quest for gold was incidental to interests of Anglo cattle ranchers, farm, railroad, and mine owners, and real estate developers. Even Anglos who bowed politely to a Spanish inheritance looked forward to a very different future.13 Other factors were also at work in depleting the modern Spanish heritage of its once-incisive meaning. One was the appearance of new Spanishspeaking leaders. As Hispanos such as Arthur Campa and Dennis Chávez rose to prominence, Octaviano Larrazolo, Nina Otero-Warren, Antonio Lucero, and Cleofas Jaramillo passed from the scene. Change was also afoot among the humbler ranks of the Rio Arriba villagers. The crisis of the 1930s forced growing numbers of romantics to reckon with changing times. A watershed of sorts was the 1940 publication of Forgotten People, George I. Sánchez’s study of Hispano privations in Taos County. The education professor documented in eye-opening detail the effects

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of Anglo conquest and neglect after 1848.14 Then, in the 1940s, came the war. Drawing villagers out of the Rio Arriba, military service and war industries altered both the reality and the perception of arts and lore. As los paisanos departed for new jobs, some at the new Los Alamos atomic laboratories, a Spanish past seemed that much farther from the twentieth century. Without the backing of a powerful and numerically dominant Hispano society, the modern Spanish heritage lost its sharp edge for defining the upper Rio Grande’s social character. What has remained in place are the symbolic forms through which a Spanish legacy is still honored. Though the urgency of redeeming the upper Rio Grande from the “Mexican” has abated, a somewhat hollowed-out Spanish heritage still has its appeal. Consider, first, the tenacious hold of “Spanish American.” Even in recent decades, terms such as “Chicano,” “Latino,” and “Mexican American” have made limited progress in northern New Mexico. In Spanish, Hispanos have long referred to themselves as los mexicanos, a term that commonly signifies a New Mexican identity apart from mexicanos de México. Yet, as a 1972 survey suggested, “Spanish” and “Spanish American” are still the preferred English terms among virtually all age groups, while “Mexican” remains the least acceptable alternative. When speaking English, in other words, a considerable number of Spanish-speaking New Mexicans avoid associations with the “Mexican.” Their discomfort has sometimes prompted open debate. In 1997, for example, an Hispano superintendent of the eastern New Mexico town of Vaughn dismissed Nadine and Patsy Córdova from their high school posts, allegedly for teaching a Chicano studies curriculum. Charged with fostering racism in the classroom, the teachers ran afoul of the local Hispano preference, as one observer put it, to identify with “two glorious traditions, the Spanish tradition and the American tradition.” 15 Spanish distinction also remains embedded in Santa Fe’s adobe architecture. The massive earth-toned forms continue to command admiration (some of it reflexive) in and beyond the capital city. Although Sylvanus Morley’s original emphasis on Spanish colonial antecedents has long since been lost in the more contemporary Santa Fe Style, elements of the design persist in recalling the romance of Franciscan missionaries and gracious hacendados. No longer aimed at reinscribing the social character of New Mexico, Santa Fe Style still serves the narrower goal of attracting tourists and wealthy migrants. Indeed, it has done its work far too well. As astute commentators have recently observed, it has helped to transform the capital city into “Santa Fake,” a veritable theme

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park of T-shirt shops, trendy restaurants, and upscale galleries. Unable to keep up with housing costs or property taxes, longtime Hispano residents have moved steadily from the cozy downtown to the city’s outskirts. Santa Fe Style has thus become an emblem of conspicuous and sensualist consumption that threatens to ruin the very conditions on which it thrives. What began in 1912 as a strategy to lure educated and well-to-do Anglos to an exotic locale has metastasized into a process that not even the wealthiest developers can fully control.16 Elements of change and continuity are likewise evident at the Santa Fe Fiesta. Since the 1930s manifestations of Anglo control have receded even farther into the background. Although the festival still serves the tourist industry, it is now organized and directed by local Hispanos, and the subtle caricature of villagers as a premodern folk is no longer part of the show. The most evident fault line has also shifted. Once lying between the sophisticated Anglo and an unschooled “Spanish culture,” it now divides middle-class Hispanos and the vanquished Indian. Today’s Fiesta presents an opportunity for Hispanos to assert their pride of descent from Spanish soldiers of the sword and cross. As one man said of the 1990 event, “The minute that you hear those mariarchis, oh, right away, and then see La Conquistadora, and your religion comes out[,] . . . and then you start thinking about your ancestors and what they went through to make it what it is today.” Even as clerical leaders have taken steps to make room for Pueblo Indians in the Fiesta program, it remains difficult to disguise or ignore the historical facts of conquest.17 In 1998 the smoldering tensions were reignited by the observance of the four hundredth anniversary of Juan de Oñate’s colonization of the upper Rio Grande. As Hispanos attended celebrations and mined family genealogies, one Indian group plotted symbolic revenge. In Española, near the site of the first Spanish settlement, commandos from Acoma Pueblo sawed off the right foot of a bronze statue of Oñate to retaliate for the conquistador’s annihilation of Acoma in 1599 and the subsequent mutilation of its adult male survivors. “When I think of what Oñate did to the Acoma Pueblo, I have a vision of Indian men lined up to have one foot cut off,” Andrés Lauriano, a Sandia tribal council member wrote in a newspaper editorial. “I see the blood pouring from their legs as they crawled or hopped away. I see the bloody pile of feet left behind.” 18 The deepest and most vibrant source of colonial symbolism is still the Hispano village. Cundiyo, Ojo Sarco, Abiquiu, Tierra Amarilla, Chamisal, Truchas, Cordova— each community takes its place in what

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is still considered the enriching fabric of the upper Rio Grande’s Spanish folklife. The villages and outsiders’ perceptions of them have certainly undergone considerable change since the 1930s. If old Penitente moradas still command reverence, the Penitentes themselves have dwindled and their Lenten devotions have lost their Anglo audiences. If handmade furniture and santos still bring buyers to the capital city’s “Spanish Market,” today’s cosmopolitan artists bear little resemblance to Agua Fria’s Celso Gallegos and Taos’s Patrocino Barela. And if the lives of the “Spanish folk” remain a picturesque tourist attraction, they no longer represent a barrier to, in Pearce’s pre-1940 conception, “the tyranny of the machine” and the “slavery of time and labor.” 19 Still, the mystique of the village remains central to the visual and rhetorical imagery by which visitors and residents alike understand northern New Mexico. Both Hispanos and Anglos take pleasure in its abiding presence. The staying power of Spanish colonial symbolism leads back to the most basic question about the revival: what did it all mean? How can one sum up forty years of diverse endeavors and aspirations? What did figures as different as Albert Fall, Antonio Lucero, and Mary Austin have in common? What do their actions tell us about the history of the upper Rio Grande? And what, if anything, do they say about the history of modern America? The answer to each question begins with the idea of a Spanish colonial inheritance. The upper Rio Grande’s reconstructed Spanish heritage, a vocabulary of words and images, offered prominent Hispanos and Anglos the rhetorical means to redefine the area’s social character. Different in many ways, the admirers found common cause in the crusade to banish the “Mexican” to points south, to redraw the line that divided Hispano from Anglo, rich from poor, into a circle of inclusion. As elite Hispanos sought recognition as leaders of “SpanishAmericans” or a “Spanish culture,” Anglo politicians, civic boosters, artists, and writers discovered a way of talking and thinking about los paisanos that would raise their own social status, or, at the very least, provide a comforting haven from the unpleasant “Mexican.” As it cut across racial lines, the Spanish revival was both a cooperative effort itself and a recipe for racial coexistence. It advanced what the New York Times referred to as “the breaking down of racial antagonisms” and the “growing understanding and affection between the natives and the newcomers.” 20 To a large degree, the recipe worked. By 1940, having recast nativos as the bearers of a colonial legacy, the revival had created the rhetorical basis for a remarkable degree of interracial cooperation. Compared with the open racial hostility that flared across America dur-

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ing the next half century, the coexistence and cooperation of “Anglos” and “Spanish-Americans” in state government, public schools, workplaces, and neighborhoods was and is especially noteworthy, and it should not be taken lightly. When Anglo New Mexicans paid a visit to Truchas, attended the Santa Fe Fiesta, voted for a Spanish-speaking politician, or lived in a mixed housing development, the modern Spanish heritage colored the admiration they so often expressed for their Hispano neighbors. Yet behind the real feelings of fellowship remains the nagging problem of racial inequality. Disparities of wealth and political sway force one to reckon on a very practical level with the incongruence of language and power. The modern Spanish heritage held out the promise of cooperation because it functioned as an idiom of shared status in a setting of mixed blood and poverty. It provided the rhetorical basis for transforming the nineteenth-century “Mexican” into the progeny of Spain. It could not, however, slow Hispanos’ material decline or close the gap between them and the Anglo newcomers. Material differences always had profound consequences. If Anglos took pride in the apparent inclusiveness of their society, they rarely recognized Hispanos as their equals. The power of wealth or social standing enabled them to determine the authenticity of folk art, to dictate Spanish architectural styles, and even to use Spanish symbols for their own aggrandizement. Although no Anglo could tell the likes of J. Francisco Chaves, Antonio Lucero, or Nina Otero-Warren how to commemorate the past, neither could Hispano memories halt the relative slippage of the Chaves, Lucero, and Otero families. In fact, remembrances of things past only made that slippage easier to bear. The revival’s most unfortunate burden fell upon the people most enthusiastically celebrated, los paisanos of the Rio Arriba. By infusing village life with the warm glow of a folk culture, Spanish symbolism camouflaged its everyday problems. It diverted outsiders’ attention from the villagers’ miseries, making them seem bearable, even natural. One poignant illustration is the story of Miguel Chávez of Los Cordovas. In the early 1950s Chávez was the subject of Joseph Krumgold’s award-winning book and film, And Now Miguel. The twelve-year-old son of a sheep rancher, Miguel is presented in the film as an ordinary boy with a burning ambition to join his father and brothers in the Rio Arriba’s high sheep meadows. The film is still considered a classic portrayal of the Hispano rancher’s wholesome life, and its happy ending— Miguel succeeds—always pleases the students who watch it in northern New Mexico’s elementary schools. The critic Lawrence Clark Powell

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called it almost “unbearably beautiful.” Left untold was the rest of Miguel’s story. Like many young men before him, Miguel abandoned the picturesque but unremunerative pastoral life for a try at wage labor. A few years after achieving his dream, he was spotted bagging groceries in a Taos supermarket.21 The case of Miguel Chávez illustrates the revival’s most insidious consequence: the celebration of los paisanos as a people of the past. Across the Southwest, the degraded “Mexican” has always embodied the unpleasant image of racial backwardness. Spanish-speaking people have long been marked as lacking the skills, intelligence, and character to function in a modern economy. That perception has likewise colored attitudes toward New Mexico’s paisanos. Soldiers, merchants, missionaries, and even depression-era social scientists saw little more than passive and fatalistic farmers, a people imprisoned by tradition. In 1939 Stanford-educated sociologist Paul A. F. Walter, Jr., described Hispano culture as a force “highly resistant to change” that “renders the people immobile.” He found communities not twenty miles from Albuquerque “where the tempo of life is more like the seventeenth century than the twentieth” and residents stand out against “the more typically American individualism and efficiency.” Building on like insights, Margaret Mead described New Mexico’s rural “Spanish-Americans” as a people who, having adopted the ways of their fathers, perpetuated an age-old aversion to hard work and a love of fiestas.22 In other words, not even the more sympathetic observers easily discarded long-held and widely shared assumptions. Spanish symbolism altered the picture only insofar as it offered a friendlier formulation: los paisanos, the descendants of the first colonists, were to be revered as a people of the past. They were to play an honored and even essential part in constructing New Mexico’s social diversity, with old racial perspectives of the “Mexican” wrapped in the modern Spanish guise. New Mexico’s Spanish colonial revival is not without its larger lessons, although its very nature may suggest otherwise. It took place in a relatively out-of-the-way setting, well off the beaten tracks of twentiethcentury America. Out-of-state attention to it was always limited. As the failure of the Coronado Cuarto Centennial Exposition makes plain, Spanish colonial symbolism may have intrigued the occasional traveler and big city critic, but its potency was limited to the upper Rio Grande. If this secluded region is at all instructive, the lesson surely lies in its history of racial difference. Long before the twentieth century, European settlers and Indians created a mestizo society, one whose ambiguous

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racial and cultural character provided fertile ground for a Spanish revival. When twentieth-century New Mexicans perceived racial difference, they encountered a set of images far more variegated than the reductive categories “blackness,” “brownness,” or “whiteness” that are so common to our contemporary discussions. Along with notions of color, the idea of race in northern New Mexico was entangled in perceptions of laboring skills, civility, character, and the numerous everyday practices we typically associate with “culture.” Admirers of a Spanish past did not just “construct” or “make” Hispano whiteness; they used Spanish symbolism in complicated and often contradictory ways to find a comfortable and rewarding place for themselves in a setting dominated by los paisanos. In that figurative place they could honor paisanos as bearers of a Spanish inheritance yet still deem them racially and culturally backward. Just as the racial and cultural character of los paisanos has always divided Hispano New Mexico from the modern American nation, it was the Spanish revival that helped to close the gap. Despite the upper Rio Grande’s distinctive history, that is, Spanish colonial symbols were not designed to glorify Spain or even Spanish colonies. Their real function was to cast the modern-day upper Rio Grande in terms acceptable, perhaps even valuable, to twentieth-century America. The “SpanishAmerican” label is only the most obvious example. Spanish architecture, the Santa Fe Fiesta, and the revival of folk art functioned in similar ways. In each case, symbols of an enduring Spanish character told elite New Mexicans how a once-disparaged population could be safely brought into the American fold. Now represented as a warm, organic, and feminized folk culture, los paisanos no longer presented the threat of the benighted “Mexican.” Now they could take their humble and distinctive place in a pluralistic United States and, perhaps, as Mary Austin and Nina Otero-Warren argued, even make the nation better for it. No longer forgotten, or an embarrassment, they had become a people to love and treasure, a people gloriously peripheral to modern times.

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Notes

Abbreviations AHA

American Historical Review

AQ

American Quarterly

CCC–MNM

Coronado Cuarto Centennial Commission Records, Museum of New Mexico

CCC–RC

Coronado Cuarto Centennial Commission Records, New Mexico State Records Center and Archives

CSWR

Center for Southwest Research, General Library, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque

HEH

Henry E. Huntington Library, San Marino, California

JAH

Journal of American History

JSW

Journal of the Southwest

MNM

Fray Angelico Chavez History Library, Museum of New Mexico, Santa Fe

NMHR

New Mexico Historical Review

NMQ

New Mexico Quarterly

NMSRCA

New Mexico State Records Center and Archives, Santa Fe

SFNM

Santa Fe New Mexican

WHQ

Western Historical Quarterly

WPA

Works Progress Administration, Federal Writers’ Project Manuscripts

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Introduction 1. Katharine Fullerton Gerould, “New Mexico and the Backwash of Spain,” Harper’s Monthly Magazine 151 (July 1925): 199 –212, esp. 200, 206. See also “Salt Lake: The City of the Saints,” 149 (June 1924): 25 – 40; “San Francisco Revisited,” 149 (July 1924): 187–202; “Our Northwestern States,” 150 (March 1925): 412 –28; and “Reno,” 151 (June 1925): 47–59. 2. Like others who study northern New Mexico, I refer to its Spanishspeaking people as Hispano. Although the term may suggest a narrowly Spanish identity, labels such as Chicano, Latino, Mexican, or Mexican American tend to diminish important subregional differences. When referring to Spanishspeaking people of the greater Southwest, I speak of “ethnic Mexicans.” On this usage, see David G. Gutiérrez, Walls and Mirrors: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the Politics of Ethnicity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 218 n. 3. For a discussion of changing terms since Spanish colonization, see Ramón A. Gutiérrez, “Unraveling America’s Hispanic Past: Internal Stratification and Class Boundaries,” Aztlán 17 (Spring 1986): 79 –102; and Aída Hurtado and Carlos H. Arce, “Mexicans, Chicanos, Mexican Americans, or Pochos . . . ¿Qué somos? The Impact of Language and Nativity on Ethnic Labeling,” Aztlán 17 (Spring 1986): 103 –30. A note on usage: Except for words already absorbed into English, I italicize all Spanish-language words and retain diacritical marks. I also keep diacritical marks for given names and surnames. For places located in the United States, accent marks are dropped but, to indicate pronunciation, tildes remain. 3. “Personal and Otherwise,” Harper’s Monthly Magazine 151 (October 1925): 640. The angry reply startled the magazine’s editors, or so they claimed; one rather suspects that they fully anticipated it. They probably guessed that Santa Fe’s business class, like that of any small western town, would seize each and every chance to answer the slight of an eastern publication. 4. A social history of twentieth-century Santa Fe has yet to be written. For useful background information, see Deena J. Gonzales, Refusing the Favor: The Spanish-Mexican Women of Santa Fe, 1820– 1880 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 39 –78; Chris Wilson, The Myth of Santa Fe: Creating a Modern Regional Tradition (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1997), 46 –79; Beatrice Chauvenet, Hewett and Friends: A Biography of Santa Fe’s Vibrant Era (Santa Fe: Museum of New Mexico Press, 1983), 109 –86; and Terry Jon Lehmann, “Santa Fe and Albuquerque, 1870 –1900: Contrast and Conflict in the Development of Two Southwestern Towns” (Ph.D. diss., Indiana University, 1974), 20 –30 and passim. Literature on Santa Fe’s Anglo artists and writers is more abundant. See Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant, “The Santa Fe Group,” Saturday Review of Literature 11 (December 8, 1934): 352 –54; Ruth Laughlin, “Santa Fe in the Twenties,” New Mexico Quarterly Review 19 (Spring 1949): 58 – 66; Arrell Morgan Gibson, The Santa Fe and Taos Colonies: Age of the Muses, 1900– 1942 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1983), 69 –84; Marta Weigle and Kyle Fiore, Santa Fe and Taos: The Writer’s Era, 1916 – 1941 (Santa Fe: Ancient City Press, 1982), 9 –73; Kay Aiken Reeve, Santa Fe and Taos, 1898– 1942: An

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American Cultural Center (El Paso: University of Texas at El Paso Press, 1982), 2 – 42; and James Mann Gaither, “A Return to the Village: A Study of Santa Fe and Taos, New Mexico, as Cultural Centers, 1900 –1934” (Ph.D. diss., University of Minnesota, 1957), 119 –323. 5. On efforts to protect and promote Indian art, see Margaret Jacobs, “Shaping a New Way: White Women and the Movement to Promote Pueblo Indian Arts and Crafts, 1900 –1935,” JSW 40 (Summer 1998): 186 –215; Molly Mullin, “The Patronage of Difference: Making Indian Art ‘Art, Not Ethnology,’” Cultural Anthropology 7 (Winter 1992): 395 – 424; Kenneth Dauber, “Pueblo Pottery and the Politics of Regional Identity,” JSW 32 (Winter 1990): 576 –96; Edwin L. Wade, “The Ethnic Art Market in the American Southwest, 1880 – 1980,” in Objects and Others: Essays on Museums and Material Culture, ed. George W. Stocking, Jr. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985): 167– 91; and Bruce David Bernstein, “The Marketing of Culture: Pottery and Santa Fe’s Indian Market” (Ph.D. diss., University of New Mexico, 1993), 105 –62. The Spanish Colonial Arts Society is described in Marta Weigle, “The First Twenty-five Years of the Spanish Colonial Arts Society,” in Hispanic Arts and Ethnohistory in the Southwest: New Papers Inspired by the Work of E. Boyd, ed. Marta Weigle (Santa Fe: Ancient City Press, 1983), 181–203. 6. Untitled manuscript, 6, Mary Hunter Austin Papers, file 25, HEH. The article apparently went unpublished. 7. Gerould, “New Mexico and the Backwash of Spain,” 204, 206. 8. Indeed, Gerould only echoed the anti-Spanish sentiments that Protestant America had long taken for granted. See, for example, Philip Wayne Powell, Tree of Hate: Propaganda and Prejudices Affecting United States Relations with the Hispanic World (New York: Basic Books, 1971), 3 –13. 9. Austin, untitled manuscript, 3 – 4. On Austin’s life, see Esther Lanigan Stineman, Mary Austin: Song of a Maverick (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1989); and Augusta Fink, I-Mary: A Biography of Mary Austin (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1983). 10. Anglo residents of New Mexico’s eastern and western counties showed little interest in a Spanish past, nor did it excite most Spanish-speaking people at the lower end of the Rio Grande Valley, an area most influenced by Mexican immigrants. On the settlement of the Rio Arriba and Rio Abajo, see Richard Nostrand, The Hispano Homeland (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992), 3 –97; Alvar Ward Carlson, The Spanish-American Homeland: Four Centuries in New Mexico’s Rio Arriba (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 67–87; Joseph P. Sánchez, The Rio Abajo Frontier, 1540– 1692: A History of Early Colonial New Mexico (Albuquerque: Albuquerque Museum, 1987); and Tibo J. Chávez and Gilberto Espinosa, El Río Abajo (Portales, New Mex.: Bishop Publishing, 1973). For a broader view of the area’s social geography, see D. W. Meinig, Southwest: Three Peoples in Geographical Change, 1600– 1970 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971). 11. Ramón A. Gutiérrez, When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away: Marriage, Sexuality, and Power in New Mexico, 1500– 1846 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1991), 92, 180 –206. Nostrand, Hispano Homeland, 49 –67.

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For overviews of Indian influences and fortunes in New Mexico, see Thomas D. Hall, Social Change in the Southwest, 1350– 1880 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1989); and Edward H. Spicer, Cycles of Conquest: The Impact of Spain, Mexico, and the United States on the Indians of the Southwest, 1533– 1960 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1962). On voting, see Richard N. Ellis, “Hispanic Americans and Indians in New Mexico State Politics,” NMHR 53 (October 1978): 363. 12. Nostrand, Hispano Homeland, 20 –22, 35, 45, 230 –32. Determining the Hispano population of New Mexico has always been a tall order. Data from before 1800 are derived from estimates and enumerations that were often less than systematic. After 1850 the U.S. Bureau of the Census did not separate Hispanos from Anglos. Individual enumerators recorded Hispanos as either “white” or “Mex,” while decennial summaries treated all Hispanos as “white.” In 1930 the bureau established a “Mexican” category, but individual enumerators continued to follow their own logic in counting Spanish-speaking people as either “Mexican” or “white.” The best estimates of the size of the two racial groups from 1850 to 1900 are obtained by comparing the New Mexican–born “native white population,” which excluded Indians and African Americans, with the native white population born outside the territory. The estimates grow less reliable after 1900, when increasing numbers of Anglos were born in New Mexico. For a comparison of the levels from 1890 to 1910, see U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Thirteenth Census of the United States, 1910, vol. 3, Population 1910 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1913), 171, table 3. 13. Given flaws in the 1850 census and New Mexico’s changing boundaries (parts of the territory were later ceded to Colorado and Arizona), one must treat the figures as approximations. Richard Nostrand, “Mexican Americans circa 1850,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 65 (September 1975): 383 –86; Hispano Homeland, 19 –20, 105 –6. On the problem of an Hispano undercount, see Oscar J. Martínez, “On the Size of the Chicano Population: New Estimates, 1850 –1900,” Aztlán 6 (Spring 1975): 43 –59. 14. U.S. Department of the Interior, Census Office, Statistics of the Population of the United States at the Tenth Census, vol. 1 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1883), 487. 15. U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Thirteenth Census of the United States, 171. 16. On terms of identification, see Robert J. Rosenbaum, Mexicano Resistance in the Southwest: “The Sacred Right of Self-Preservation” (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 114 –19. In the absence of detailed historical studies, the composition of nineteenth-century Hispano society remains a matter of some conjecture. In 1949 the journalist and scholar Carey McWilliams estimated that los ricos constituted roughly 2 percent of the Spanish-speaking population. His figure was probably derived from the 1844 account of the trader Josiah Gregg. In a recent study, the historian Deena Gonzales estimates the rico segment at no more than 5 to 8 percent of all Hispanos. See Carey McWilliams, North from Mexico: The Spanish-speaking People of the United States (Philadel-

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phia: Lippincott, 1948; Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1990), 71; Gregg, Commerce of the Prairies: The Journal of a Santa Fe Trader (1844; reprint, Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1954), 106; and Gonzales, Refusing the Favor, 42. 17. Questions of racial difference have inspired several phases of scholarship of the Mexican American Southwest. In the 1970s scholars emphasized parallels between Anglo conquest and the colonial subordination of nonwhite peoples worldwide. By the mid-1980s scholars were looking less at Anglo conquest per se than at how ethnic Mexicans adapted to it. Some of the most recent work, notably involving gender, labor, and immigration, has explored how such adaptations have yielded multifaceted and at times ambivalent Mexican American identities. For a sampling of the changing approaches, see Rodolfo Acuña, Occupied America: The Chicano’s Struggle toward Liberation (San Francisco: Canfield Press, 1972); Mario Barrera, Race and Class in the Southwest: A Theory of Racial Inequality (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1979); Albert Camarillo, Chicanos in a Changing Society: From Mexican Pueblos to American Barrios in Santa Barbara and Southern California, 1848– 1930 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979); Tomás Almaguer, “Ideological Distortions in Recent Chicano Historiography: The Internal Model and Chicano Historical Interpretation,” Aztlán 18 (Spring 1987): 7–28; Sarah Deutsch, No Separate Refuge: Culture, Class, and Gender on an Anglo-Hispanic Frontier in the American Southwest, 1880– 1940 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); Alex M. Saragoza, “Recent Chicano Historiography: An Interpretive Essay,” Aztlán 19 (Spring 1988 –90): 1–78; Antonia I. Castañeda, “Gender, Race, and Culture: Spanish-Mexican Women in the Historiography of Frontier California,” Frontiers 11 (1990): 8 –20; George J. Sánchez, Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture, and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900– 1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); Adela de la Torre and Beatriz M. Pesquera, eds., Building with Our Hands: New Directions in Chicana Studies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); and Gutiérrez, Walls and Mirrors. 18. See Rebecca McDowell Craver, The Impact of Intimacy: Mexican-Anglo Intermarriage in New Mexico, 1821– 1846 (El Paso: University of Texas at El Paso Press, 1982). 19. On the cultural construction of race, see Peggy Pascoe, “Miscegenation Law, Court Cases, and Ideologies of ‘Race’ in Twentieth-Century America,” JAH 83 (June 1996): 44 –69. For a more materialist perspective, see Barbara J. Fields, “Ideology and Race in American History,” in Region, Race, and Reconstruction: Essays in Honor of C. Vann Woodward, ed. J. Morgan Kousser and James M. McPherson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 143 –58. On nineteenth-century racial ideology and its material sources, see Alexander Saxton, The Rise and Fall of the White Republic: Class Politics and Mass Culture in Nineteenth-Century America (London: Verso, 1990), 2 –18; Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981), 81–228; and Ronald Takaki, Iron Cages: Race and Culture in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Knopf, 1977), xiii–xvii.

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20. For overviews of westward expansion, see William G. Robbins, Colony and Empire: The Capitalist Transformation of the American West (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1994); Richard White, “It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own”: A New History of the American West (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991); and Patricia Nelson Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West (New York: Norton, 1987). On the linkage of production and racial difference, see Tomás Almaguer, Racial Fault Lines: The Historical Origins of White Supremacy in California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), esp. 153 –205; and Richard White, “Race Relations in the American West,” AQ 38 (1986): 396 – 416. 21. Leonard Pitt, The Decline of the Californios: A Social History of Spanishspeaking Californians, 1846 – 1890 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966), 48 –103. See also Almaguer, Racial Fault Lines, 45 –74; Lisbeth Haas, Conquests and Historical Identities in California, 1769– 1936 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 60 –64; and Douglas Monroy, Thrown among Strangers: The Making of Mexican Culture in Frontier California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 208 –19. 22. David Montejano, Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1987), 50 –63, 113 –17. Mario T. García, Desert Immigrants: The Mexicans of El Paso, 1880– 1920 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1981), 65 –109. 23. “[T]he most crucial development” of expansion and domination, writes the historian David G. Gutiérrez, was the “construction of elaborate sets of rationales which are designed to explain why one group has conquered another.” See Gutiérrez, “Significant to Whom? Mexican Americans and the History of the American West,” WHQ 24 (November 1993): 520. 24. On Texas, see Montejano, Anglos and Mexicans, 34 – 49; and Evan Anders, Boss Rule in South Texas: The Progressive Era (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982), 3 –64. On California, see Pitt, Decline of the Californios, 120 –29; Monroy, Thrown among Strangers, 158 –62; and Almaguer, Racial Fault Lines, 57–65. 25. The Hispano network of an Anglo sheep rancher is described in Robert J. Tórrez, “‘El Bornes’: La Tierra Amarilla and T. D. Burns,” NMHR 56 (April 1981): 161–75. On party politics, see Robert W. Larson, “Territorial Politics and Cultural Impact,” NMHR 60 (July 1985): 254 –60. On marriage after the American takeover, see Darlis A. Miller, “Cross-Cultural Marriages in the Southwest: The New Mexico Experience, 1846 –1900,” NMHR 57 (October 1982): 335 –59. The history of racial mixing in the United States is recounted in Gary B. Nash, “The Hidden History of Mestizo America,” JAH 82 (December 1995): 941–62. 26. Almaguer, Racial Fault Lines, 29. Arnoldo De León, Mexican Americans in Texas: A Brief History (Wheeling, Ill.: Harlan Davidson, 1993), 58 –59. 27. On accommodation in New Mexico, see Carolyn Zeleny, Relations between Spanish-Americans and Anglo-Americans of New Mexico (New York: Arno Press, 1974), 124 –235; Larson, “Territorial Politics and Cultural Impact,” 249 –69; and Doris Meyer, Speaking for Themselves: Neomexicano Cultural Identity and the Spanish-Language Press, 1880– 1920 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996), 26.

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28. On the concept of heritage, see David Lowenthal, Possessed by the Past: The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History (New York: Free Press, 1996), 127– 47. 29. See, for example, Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1950); R. W. B. Lewis, The American Adam: Innocence, Tragedy, and Tradition in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955); Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964); and Alan Trachtenberg, Brooklyn Bridge: Fact and Symbol (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965). 30. On debates over the myth and symbol approach, see Bruce Kuklick, “Myth and Symbol in American Studies,” AQ 24 (October 1972): 435 –50; and Alan Trachtenberg, “Myth and Symbol,” Massachusetts Review 25 (Winter 1984): 667–73. 31. Clifford Geertz, “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture,” in The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 30. See also Ronald G. Walters, “Signs of the Times: Clifford Geertz and the Historians,” Social Research 47 (Autumn 1980): 537–56. 32. A succinct statement of the linguistic position is Roger Chartier, “The World as Representation,” trans. Arthur Goldhammer, in Histories: French Constructions of the Past, ed. Jacques Revel and Lynn Hunt (New York: New Press, 1995), 544 –58. On problems and possibilities for the historian, see Jay M. Smith, “Words, Beliefs, and the Political Culture of Early Modern France,” AHR 102 (December 1997): 1413 – 40; George Lipsitz, “Listening to Learn and Learning to Listen: Popular Culture, Cultural Theory, and American Studies,” AQ 42 (December 1990): 615 –36; and John E. Toews, “Intellectual History after the Linguistic Turn: The Autonomy of Meaning and Irreducibility of Experience,” AHR 92 (October 1987): 879 –907. A account of the dilemma in a somewhat broader context is Stuart Hall, “Cultural Studies: Two Paradigms,”in Culture/ Power/History: A Reader in Contemporary Social Theory, ed. Nicholas B. Dirks, Geoff Eley, and Sherry B. Ortner (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994), 520 –38. 33. The power of language in the former and more traditional sense is described, for example, in Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983). On approaches to language, see Penelope J. Corfield, “Introduction: Historians and Language,” in Language, History, and Class, ed. Penelope J. Corfield (Cambridge: Basil Blackwell, 1991), 1–29; and Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 21– 44, 115 –20. 34. The pioneering work on collective memory is Maurice Halbwach’s La mémoire collective (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1950; trans. The Collective Memory, New York: Harper & Row, 1980). Revived in the 1980s, the study of memory has already produced a voluminous scholarship. Prominent works in the American context include Michael G. Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture (New York: Knopf, 1991); John Bodnar, Remaking America: Public Memory, Commemora-

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tion, and Patriotism in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992); and George Lipsitz, Time Passages: Collective Memory and American Popular Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990). For an analysis of the memory concept and its uses, see Iwona Irwin-Zarecka, Frames of Remembrance: The Dynamics of Collective Memory (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1994); Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Jeffrey K. Olick and Joyce Robbins, “Social Memory Studies: From ‘Collective Memory’ to the Historical Sociology of Mnemonic Practices,” Annual Review of Sociology 24 (1998): 105 – 40; and Nao Gedi and Yigal Elam, “Collective Memory—What Is It?” History & Memory 8 (Spring–Summer 1996): 30 –50. 35. “Public” has a long lineage. As used by the German sociologist Jürgen Habermas in the “public sphere,” it connotes a place where individuals joined together in critical opposition to state authority. I use the term simply to distinguish the relatively private realm of Spanish colonial memories from the public expressions of heritage—in street festivals, art markets, political debates, and architectural monuments. On the meanings of public life, see Philip J. Ethington, The Public City: The Political Construction of Urban Life in San Francisco, 1850– 1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 14 –16; and Mary P. Ryan, Civic Wars: Democracy and Public Life in the American City during the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 5 –11. See also Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989). On the linkage between “the public” and memory, see David Glassberg, “Public History and the Study of Memory,” Public Historian 18 (Spring 1996): 7–24. 36. McWilliams, North from Mexico, 43 –53. More recent references to a fantasy heritage include Manuel Patricio Servín, “California’s Hispanic Heritage: A View into the Spanish Myth,” in New Spain’s Far Northern Frontier: Essays on Spain in the American West, 1540– 1821, ed. David J. Weber (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1979), 119 –33; John R. Chávez, The Lost Land: The Chicano Image of the Southwest (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1984), 85 –92; Joseph A. Rodríguez, “Becoming Latinos: Mexican Americans, Chicanos, and the Spanish Myth in the Urban Southwest,” WHQ 29 (Summer 1998): 165 –85; and Phoebe S. Kropp, “‘All Our Yesterdays’: The Spanish Fantasy Past and the Politics of Public Memory in Southern California, 1884 –1939” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, San Diego, 1999). 37. Eric Hobsbawm, “Introduction” and “Mass-Producing Traditions: Europe, 1870 –1914,” in The Invention of Tradition, ed. Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 1–14, 268 –307. 38. On the endurance of a Spanish cultural essence, see Marc Simmons and Buddy Mays, People of the Sun: Some Out-of-Fashion Southwesterners (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1979), 57; and Nostrand, Hispano Homeland, 3 –25. The reconstruction of ethnic identity is discussed in Sylvia Rodríguez, “The Hispano Homeland Debate Revisited,” Perspectives in Mexi-

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can American Studies 3 (1992): 95 –114. On Spanish heritage as political resistance, see Phillip B. Gonzales, “The Political Construction of Latino Nomenclatures in Twentieth-Century New Mexico,” JSW 35 (Summer 1993): 158 –85. Tourism and a regional identity are discussed in Wilson, The Myth of Santa Fe, 110 – 45. On art patrons, see Charles L. Briggs, The Wood Carvers of Córdova, New Mexico: Social Dimensions of an Artistic “Revival” (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1980), 36 –82. One work that looks at multiple contexts of creation is John Michael Nieto-Phillips, “‘No Other Blood’: History, Language, and Spanish American Ethnic Identity in New Mexico, 1880s– 1920s” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 1997). 39. On the imagined Mexican in southern California, see William Deverell, “Privileging the Mission over the Mexican: The Rise of Regional Identity in Southern California,” in Many Wests: Place, Culture, and Regional Identity, ed. David M. Wrobel and Michael C. Steiner (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1997), 235 –58. 40. In recent years scholars have productively explored how and why Americans constructed the ideal of whiteness. In some cases, however, an excessive reliance on the concept has forced complex racial perceptions into rigid analytic categories. For recent discussions of whiteness, see Grace Elizabeth Hale, Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890– 1940 (New York: Pantheon, 1998); Neil Foley, The White Scourge: Mexicans, Blacks, and Poor Whites in Texas Cotton Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); Ian F. Haney López, White by Law: The Legal Construction of Race (New York: New York University Press, 1996); and George Lipsitz, “The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: Racialized Social Democracy and the ‘White’ Problem in American Studies,” AQ 47 (September 1995): 369 –95. Each of these works adds to the pioneering study in the field, David R. Roediger’s The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (New York: Verso, 1991). 41. The Hispano elite was furthered inspired by its long-standing aversion to New Mexico’s Indians. For years, rich and poor Hispanos had kept their distance from both the Pueblos and the nomadic tribes. To their dismay, the Mexican image threatened to undercut Hispano status at the very moment Indian tribes, particularly the Pueblos, were gaining Anglo respect. 42. The classic sociological overview of the concept of social status is Reinhard Bendix and Seymour Martin Lipset, eds., Class, Status, and Power: Social Stratification in Comparative Perspective, 2d ed. (New York: Free Press, 1966). My own use of the term is akin to the concept “symbolic capital” advanced by the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. See his “Structures, Habitus, Power: Basis for a Theory of Symbolic Power,” in Culture/Power/History, 166 –78. See also the helpful introduction to Bourdieu’s very sophisticated and challenging body of theory in John B. Thompson, ed., Language and Symbolic Power (Cambridge: Basil Blackwell, 1991), 1–31. 43. Sylvia Rodríguez makes that argument in her study of Taos. See “Art, Tourism, and Race Relations in Taos: Toward a Sociology of the Art Colony,” Journal of Anthropological Research 45 (Spring 1989): 88 –90.

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Chapter 1. Hispano Fortunes in New Mexico, 1598 –1900 1. Ramón A. Gutiérrez, When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away: Marriage, Sexuality, and Power in New Mexico, 1500– 1846 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1991), 227, 259 –67. Carol Jensen, “Cleofas M. Jaramillo on Marriage in Territorial Northern New Mexico,” NMHR 58 (April 1983): 154 –56. 2. Reyes Martínez, “The Martínez Family of Arroyo Hondo,” December 11, 1936, 1–5, WPA file 5-5-47, #22, MNM. Cleofas and Venceslao, second cousins, ran the common risk of what Reyes Martínez termed “disastrous” genetic consequences. Martínez recounted the wedding while working as a folklorist with the New Mexico office of the Works Progress Administration. Material he and others compiled is archived in the Library of Congress and the New Mexico State Records Center and Archives, although the most complete collection is to be found in the Fray Angelico Chavez History Library of the Museum of New Mexico. 3. Jensen, “Cleofas M. Jaramillo on Marriage,” 156 –57. Venceslao Jaramillo to Cleofas Martínez, August 28, 1896, and January 3, 1898, Venceslao Jaramillo Papers, Box 577, MNM. Wedding invitation, Jaramillo Papers, Box 577. 4. Cleofas M. Jaramillo, Shadows of the Past (Santa Fe: Seton Village Press, 1941), 10, 96. For a somewhat different view of Jaramillo’s disposition, see Genaro M. Padilla, My History, Not Yours: The Formation of Mexican American Autobiography (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993), 196 –227. 5. David Weber, The Spanish Frontier in North America (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1992), 77–78. Gutiérrez, Corn Mothers, 47. The earliest Spanish reconnaissance of the region was carried out by Francisco Vásquez de Coronado in 1540 – 42. Gaspar Castaño de Sosa guided colonists to central New Mexico in 1590 –91, but his unauthorized expedition was forced back to Mexico. See Oakah L. Jones, Jr., Los Paisanos: Spanish Settlers on the Northern Frontier of New Spain (Norman.: University of Oklahoma Press, 1979), 109. On Oñate and his quest, see Marc Simmons, The Last Conquistador: Juan de Oñate and the Settling of the Far Southwest (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991). 6. Thomas D. Hall, Social Change in the Southwest, 1350– 1880 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1989), 39 – 41, 76 –77, 83 –84. Edward H. Spicer, Cycles of Conquest: The Impact of Spain, Mexico, and the United States on the Indians of the Southwest, 1533– 1960 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1962), 152 –55. The low end of the population range for 1598 was set by Spicer (155). The upper figure is based on an estimate recorded by Fray Alonso de Benevides in 1634. See Gutiérrez, Corn Mothers, 92. Hall (40) proposes a range for 1540 of 130,000 to 248,000. 7. Weber, Spanish Frontier, 92 –99. Gutiérrez, Corn Mothers, 46, 92 –94. 8. Weber, Spanish Frontier, 105 –13, 122 –25, 128 –29. 9. David H. Snow, “A Note on Encomienda Economics in SeventeenthCentury New Mexico,” in Hispanic Arts and Ethnohistory in the Southwest: New Papers Inspired by the Work of E. Boyd, ed. Marta Weigle (Santa Fe: Ancient City

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Press, 1983), 353 –54. Gutiérrez, Corn Mothers, 106 –7. Weber, Spanish Frontier, 133 –36. Hall, Social Change in the Southwest, 88 –90. 10. John Francis Bannon, The Spanish Borderlands Frontier, 1513– 1821 (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970), 124 –27. 11. Victor Westphall, Mercedes Reales: Hispanic Land Grants of the Upper Rio Grande Region (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1983), 35. 12. Gutiérrez, Corn Mothers, 106. On patterns of land distribution, see Malcolm Ebright, “New Mexico Land Grants: The Legal Background,” in Land, Water, and Culture: New Perspectives on Hispanic Land Grants, ed. Charles L. Briggs and John R. Van Ness (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1987), 21–24; and Marc Simmons, “Settlement Patterns and Village Plans in Colonial New Mexico,” in New Spain’s Far Northern Frontier: Essays on Spain in the American West, 1540– 1821, ed. David J. Weber (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1979), 99 –115. 13. Jones, Los Paisanos, 133 –35, 146 – 47. Antonio José Ríos-Bustamante, “New Mexico in the Eighteenth Century: Life, Labor and Trade in la Villa de San Felipe de Albuquerque, 1706 –1790,” Aztlán 7 (Fall 1976): 368 –74. See also Alicia V. Tjarks, “Demographic, Ethnic and Occupational Structure of New Mexico, 1790,” The Americas 35 (July 1978): 45 –88. The first r was dropped from Alburquerque in the modern period. 14. Marc Simmons, Coronado’s Land: Essays on Daily Life in Colonial New Mexico (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1991), 104 –6. 15. Max L. Moorhead, New Mexico’s Royal Road: Trade and Travel on the Chihauhau Trail (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1958), 50 –52. Weber, Spanish Frontier, 175, 196. 16. Richard Eighme Ahlborn, “The Will of a New Mexico Woman in 1762,” NMHR 65 (July 1990): 319 –38. 17. Gutiérrez, Corn Mothers, 145 –54. Robert Archibald, “Acculturation and Assimilation in Colonial New Mexico,” NMHR 53 (July 1978): 205 –17. Simmons, Coronado’s Land, 48. Frances Leon Quintana, Pobladores: Hispanic Americans of the Ute Frontier (n.p., 1991; reprint of Los Primeros Pobladores: Hispanic Americans of the Ute Frontier, Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1974), 41– 47. 18. Gutiérrez, Corn Mothers, 47, 103 – 4, 179 –80; and Ramón A. Gutiérrez, “Unraveling America’s Hispanic Past: Internal Stratification and Class Boundaries,” Aztlán 17 (Spring 1986): 82. 19. On casta grades, see Adrian Bustamante, “‘The Matter Was Never Resolved’: The Casta System in Colonial New Mexico, 1693 –1823,” NMHR 66 (April 1991): 143 – 44. Casta terminology varied from region to region in the Spanish colonies. 20. Gutiérrez, Corn Mothers, 148, 190, 196. Weber, Spanish Frontier, 326 –27. Quintana, Pobladores, 40. The examples are cited in Bustamante, “‘The Matter Was Never Resolved,’” 148 – 49. 21. Richard Nostrand, The Hispano Homeland (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992), 36 – 46. Jones, Los Paisanos, 110 –25. Quintana, Pobladores,

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16. Population figures exclude El Paso del Norte, the settlement at New Mexico’s extreme southern end. Except for Alburquerque, which was founded in 1706, the first towns in the Rio Abajo were established at Tome in 1739 and Belen in 1740. See Chávez and Espinosa, El Río Abajo, 33 –35. 22. Hall, Social Change in the Southwest, 112 –19. Jones, Los Paisanos, 129. Nostrand, Hispano Homeland, 45, 70 –95. On economic development at the end of the eighteenth century, see Ross Frank, “Economic Growth and the Creation of the Vecino Homeland in New Mexico, 1780 –1820,” Revista de Indias 56 (September 1996): 743 –82. 23. The observation was made as early as 1840 by Josiah Gregg. See his Commerce of the Prairies: The Journal of a Santa Fe Trader (1844; reprint, Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1954), 104 n. 9. 24. Jones, Los Paisanos, 142 – 43. Hall, Social Change in the Southwest, 95. Quintana, Pobladores, 36. Moorhead, New Mexico’s Royal Road, 49 –51. Differences also abounded within the Rio Arriba and the Rio Abajo. In both areas, villages lying close to the Rio Grande or its broader tributaries enjoyed agricultural and trading advantages over the remoter mountain or plateau communities. See John R. Van Ness, “Hispanic Village Organization in Northern New Mexico: Corporate Community Structure in Historical and Comparative Perspective,” in The Survival of Spanish American Villages, Colorado College Studies, no. 15, ed. Paul Kutsche (Colorado Springs, Col.: Colorado College, 1979), 38 –39. 25. Frances Leon Swadesh, “Structure of Hispanic-Indian Relations in New Mexico,” in Survival of Spanish American Villages, ed. Kutsche, 53 –61. 26. The memory of the founding of Questa was recounted in 1936 by Frank V. Garcia. His grandmother had informed him. WPA file 5-5-2, #52, MNM. Tomasita Benavides told her account to her daughter, Rafaelita Trujillo, who in turn related it to Simeón Tejeda, a WPA field-worker. It is not clear whether the precise wording came from Benavides, Trujillo, or Tejada. WPA file 5-5-29, #1, MNM. 27. Father Juan Augustín de Morfi, “Account of Disorders in New Mexico, 1778,” in Simmons, Coronado’s Land, 132. Pedro Bautista Pino, The Exposition on the Province of New Mexico, 1812, trans. Adrian Bustamante and Marc Simmons (Santa Fe and Albuquerque: Rancho de los Golandrinas and University of New Mexico Press, 1995), 10. 28. On La Conquistadora, see Jones, Los Paisanos, 160; and Fray Angelico Chavez, Our Lady of the Conquest (Santa Fe: Historical Society of New Mexico, 1948), 1–54. 29. William Wroth, “The Flowering and Decline of the New Mexican Santero: 1780 –1900,” in New Spain’s Far Northern Frontier, ed. Weber, 275 –82. For background on the Penitentes, see Marta Weigle, Brothers of Light, Brothers of Blood: The Penitentes of the Southwest (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1976). 30. Weber, Spanish Frontier, 314. Quintana, Pobladores, 47. Wroth, “Flowering and Decline,” 279. The geographer Richard Nostrand is the leading proponent of cultural distinctiveness. He argues that New Mexican “Spanishness” is

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based both on preserved cultural forms and on Hispanos’ desire to define a distinctive ethnic identity. See Nostrand, Hispano Homeland, 3 –25; and “Hispano Cultural Distinctiveness: A Reply,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 74 (Spring 1984): 164 –69. 31. The most pointed criticism of Nostrand’s position is J. M. Blaut and Antonio Ríos-Bustamante, “Commentary on Nostrand’s ‘Hispanos’ and their ‘Homeland,’” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 74 (Spring 1984): 157–64. 32. Frank, “Economic Growth and the Creation of the Vecino Homeland,” 778 –82. 33. Moorhead, New Mexico’s Royal Road, 58 –59, 195 –97. Susan Calafate Boyle, Los Capitalistas: Hispano Merchants and the Santa Fe Trade (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1997), 1–17. The Chihuahua monopoly created a chronic imbalance of trade. In 1812, with an income estimated at 60,000 pesos, New Mexicans spent 112,000 pesos on imports. The deficit was only partially relieved by 38,000 pesos in government subsidies. See Pino, Exposition on the Province of New Mexico, 26. 34. Moorhead, New Mexico’s Royal Road, 60 –65. Boyle, Los Capitalistas, 18 – 29. Becknell was an accidental pioneer. Intending to trade with Comanches in Kansas, he was met by Mexican soldiers and escorted to New Mexico. He was also preceded by Americans who entered the territory illegally to trap and trade. 35. Boyle, Los Capitalistas, 34 –36. Alvar Ward Carlson, “New Mexico’s Sheep Industry, 1850 –1900: Its Role in the History of the Territory,” NMHR 44 (January 1966): 25 –28. Lic. Antonio Barreiro, Ojeada sobre Nuevo-México in Three New Mexico Chronicles, trans. H. Bailey Carroll and J. Villasana Haggard (Albuquerque: Quivira Society, 1942; New York: Arno Press, 1967), 109. Chaves to Laurence Lee, September 23, 1927, Amado Chaves Papers, Box 2, NMSRCA. See also John O. Baxter, Las Carneradas: Sheep Trade in New Mexico, 1700– 1860 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1987). 36. Boyle, Los Capitalistas, 37– 43, 70. See also Sterling Evans, “Eastward Ho! The Mexico Freighting and Commerce Experience Along the Santa Fe Trail,” Kansas History 19 (Winter 1996): 242 –60; and David A. Sandoval, “Gnats, Goods, and Greasers: Mexican Merchants on the Santa Fe Trail,” Journal of the West 28 (April 1989): 22 –31. 37. Boyle, Los Capitalistas, 45 – 46. 38. Carlson, “New Mexico’s Sheep Industry,” 29 –30. David J. Weber, The Mexican Frontier, 1821– 1846: The American Southwest under Mexico (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1982), 212. The “rags to riches” myth of the partidero was told in 1827 by Juan Augustín de Escudero, a Chihuahua lawyer: “Thus the wealth of the sheepherder would increase until the day he became, like his overseer, the owner of a herd. He in turn would let out his herd to others after the manner in which he obtained his first sheep and make his fortune.” Quoted in Alvin Sunseri, “Sheep Ricos, Sheep Fortunes in the Aftermath of the American Conquest, 1846 –1861,” El Palacio 83 (Spring 1977): 4. 39. Clark Knowlton, “Patron-Peon Pattern among the Spanish Americans of New Mexico,” Social Forces 41 (October 1962): 12 –17. William B. Taylor, “Pa-

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trón Leadership at the Crossroads: Southern Colorado in the Late Nineteenth Century,” in The Chicano, ed. Norris Hundley, Jr. (Santa Barbara, Calif.: Clio Books, 1975), 73 –95. Although scholars have criticized references to “the patrón system” for suggesting that los paisanos were little more than draft animals, one should not ignore the systemic forms of patronage that governed social relationships. For critical commentary, see Frances Leon Swadesh, “The Social and Philosophical Context of Creativity in Hispanic New Mexico,” Rocky Mountain Social Science Journal 9 (January 1972): 11–18. 40. “Mateo and Rachel,” told to Lou Sage Batchen by Jose Gurulé, Benino Archibeque and Concepción Archibeque, all of Las Placitas, WPA file 5-5-49, #12, MNM. Boyle, Los Capitalistas, 145. Weber, Mexican Frontier, 212. For the sheep owner, debt peonage was superior to slavery, for it required a smaller initial investment, no tax payments, and no care for the peon in his or her old age. See Alvin Sunseri, Seeds of Discord: New Mexico in the Aftermath of the American Conquest, 1846 – 1861 (Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1979), 40 – 42. 41. Hall, Social Change in the Southwest, 154. Weber, Mexican Frontier, 208. 42. Weber, Mexican Frontier, 22 –38, 261–65. Quintana, Pobladores, 51, 55 –56. The events of 1837 are studied in Janet Lecompte, Rebellion in Rio Arriba, 1837 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1985). 43. Frank Driver Reeve, History of New Mexico, vol. 2 (New York: Lewis Historical Publishing, 1961), 224 –25. Howard Roberts Lamar, The Far Southwest, 1848– 1912: A Territorial History (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1966), 28. Weber, Mexican Frontier, 80 –82, 110 –17. As late as 1880 three quarters of all sheep in New Mexico were owned by twenty families, sixteen of which were Hispano. See Sarah Deutsch, No Separate Refuge: Culture, Class, and Gender on an Anglo-Hispanic Frontier in the American Southwest, 1880– 1940 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 29. 44. Weber, Mexican Frontier, 218 –24. 45. Reyes Martínez, “Cooperation,” February 27, 1937, 1– 4, WPA file 5-5-50, #3, MNM. Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz, Roots of Resistance: Land Tenure in New Mexico, 1680– 1980 (Los Angeles: Chicano Studies Research Center, University of California, Los Angeles, 1980), 76 –77. On scarcity and movement, see Nostrand, Hispano Homeland, 70 –88; and David H. Snow, “Rural Hispanic Community Organization in Northern New Mexico: An Historical Perspective,” in Survival of Spanish American Villages, ed. Kutsche, 50 –51. For an account of modern-day irrigation work and its impact on the Hispano village, see Stanley Crawford, Mayordomo: Chronicle of an Acequia in Northern New Mexico (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1988). 46. “Celebration of Mexican Independence,” March 26, 1822, Imperial Gazette of Mexico (Mexico City), trans. Karen Peterson, Santa Fe Records Collection, Box 1, CSWR. Weber, Mexican Frontier, 7–8. 47. “El Pronunciamento de 1837,” El Boletín Popular, Santa Fe, November 26, 1896; and circular of Antonio Vigil, in Mauro Montoya Collection of New Mexican Historical Documents, Box 558, folder 10-B, and Box 1, folder 9, respectively, MNM.

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48. The words of Mariano Chávez, reproduced in many general histories of New Mexico, are quoted in Weber, Mexican Frontier, 234. On the capacity of Hispanos, particularly women, to adapt to the conquest and sustain their communities, see Deena J. Gonzales, Refusing the Favor: The Spanish-Mexican Women of Santa Fe, 1820– 1880 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 79 –106. 49. For distributions of the nativity of New Mexico residents, see Department of the Interior, Census Office, Ninth Census– 1870, The Statistics of the Population of the United States, vol. 1 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1872), 335; and Department of the Interior, Census Office, Statistics of the Population of the United States at the Tenth Census, vol. 1 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1883), 487. See also “Note on the Population of New Mexico, 1846 –1849,” NMHR 34 (July 1959): 200 –202. Weber, Mexican Frontier, 195. 50. Barreiro, Ojeada sobre Nuevo-México, 25. 51. Weber, Mexican Frontier, 180 –82. Thomas E. Chávez, ed., Conflict and Acculturation: Manuel Alvarez’s 1842 Memorial (Santa Fe: Museum of New Mexico Press, 1989), 30. 52. Thomas E. Chávez, “The Trouble with Texans: Manuel Alvarez and the 1841 ‘Invasion,’” NMHR 53 (April 1978): 133 – 44. Lamar, Far Southwest, 53. Darlis A. Miller, “Hispanos and the Civil War in New Mexico: A Reconsideration,” NMHR 54 (April 1979): 108 –9. A second example appears in an account recorded by Lou Sage Batchen in the 1930s. Residents of the village of Las Huertas told the folklorist that after the hand-carved image of San Antonio disappeared from the local chapel in 1920, a modern saint was ordered from San Antonio, Texas. On seeing the new image, David Trujillo, a village elder, scolded residents for failing to respect the enmity of their ancestors. “You have a Texas San Antonio,” he said, “not a New Mexico San Antonio!” See “El Primer San Antonio de Las Huertas,” in “Las Placitas,” WPA file 5-5-49, #47, MNM. 53. Quoted in Hall, Social Change in the Southwest, 191. See also Lamar, Far Southwest, 50 –55; and Weber, Mexican Frontier, 190 –95. 54. Nostrand, Hispano Homeland, 103, 129. On marriages, see Miller, “Cross-Cultural Marriages in the Southwest,” 336 –37; and Rebecca McDowell Craver, The Impact of Intimacy: Mexican-Anglo Intermarriage in New Mexico, 1821– 1846 (El Paso: University of Texas at El Paso Press, 1983). On Hispana lives during the Mexican period, see Gonzales, Refusing the Favor, 39 –78; and Janet Lecompte, “The Independent Women of Hispanic New Mexico, 1821–1846,” WHQ 12 (January 1981): 17–35. 55. Quoted in Sunseri, Seeds of Discord, 85. Lamar, Far Southwest, 13, 66. 56. Richard N. Ellis, “Hispanic Americans and Indians in New Mexico State Politics,” NMHR 53 (October 1978): 361–62. Lamar, Far Southwest, 86 –89. 57. Hall, Social Change in the Southwest, 212. Deena J. Gonzales, “The Widowed Women of Santa Fe: Assessments on the Lives of an Unmarried Population, 1850 –1880,” in Unequal Sisters: A Multicultural Reader in U.S. Women’s History, ed. Ellen C. Dubois and Vicki L. Ruiz (New York: Routledge, 1990), 37.

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58. William J. Parish, “The German Jew and the Commercial Revolution in Territorial New Mexico, 1850 –1900,” NMHR 35 (January 1960): 1–23. Boyle, Los Capitalistas, 100 –109. Nostrand, Hispano Homeland, 110 –13. See also William J. Parish, The Charles Ilfeld Company: A Study of the Rise and Decline of Mercantile Capitalism in New Mexico (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1961); and, for a broader account of Jewish migrants, Henry J. Tobias, A History of the Jews in New Mexico (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1990). Of the seventy persons in 1868 who paid tax on incomes of $1,000 or more, only ten were Hispano. Santa Fe Daily New Mexican, May 19, 1869, Shishkin Collection, Box 5, folder 45, NMSRCA. 59. Nostrand, Hispano Homeland, 112 –14. Mario Barrera, Race and Class in the Southwest: A Theory of Racial Inequality (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1979), 24. 60. Thomas R. López, Prospects for the Spanish American Culture of New Mexico (San Francisco: R and E Research Associates, 1974), 64. Reeve, History of New Mexico, 210. Lamar, Far Southwest, 175 –76. 61. Deutsch, No Separate Refuge, 17–32. Carlson, “New Mexico’s Sheep Industry,” 35 –37. 62. Westphall, Mercedes Reales, 87–89, 143. See also Richard Griswold del Castillo, The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo: A Legacy of Conflict (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1990). 63. Westphall, Mercedes Reales, 9 –11, 87–89, 143. 64. Iris Wilson Engstrand, “Land Grant Problems in the Southwest: The Spanish and Mexican Heritage,” NMHR 53 (October 1978): 317–18. Edmund G. Ross, “Spanish Grants in New Mexico: The Albuquerque Town Grant, Its Character and History,” 1884, Ross Collection, Box 1, CSWR. Westphall, Mercedes Reales, 142 – 43. 65. Batchen compiled villagers’ memories in “The Story of Ojo de la Casa,” 49, and “The Town of Tejon,” 3, two chapters of “Las Placitas,” WPA file 5-5-49, #47, MNM. Interviews with Luis Bustos and Florencio Aragón, in Las Vegas Oral Histories, Carnegie Public Library, Las Vegas, New Mex. 66. Westphall, Mercedes Reales, 138, 191, 265. Lamar, Far Southwest, 150. Ortiz, Roots of Resistance, 92, 150, n. 6. 67. Deutsch, No Separate Refuge, 21. On the problem of law and custom in adjudicating land claims, see Malcolm Ebright, Land Grants and Lawsuits in Northern New Mexico (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1994), 3 – 4. 68. Nostrand, Hispano Homeland, 72, 77. Westphall, Mercedes Reales, 265. On the complex story of San Miguel del Vado, see G. Emlen Hall, “San Miguel del Bado and the Loss of the Common Lands of New Mexico Community Land Grants,” NMHR 66 (October 1991): 413 –32. 69. A. M. Bergere, “Spanish and Mexican Land Grants in New Mexico,” A. M. Bergere Family Papers, Box 3, NMSRCA. Chávez and Espinosa, El Río Abajo, 96. 70. Steven W. Hackel, “Land, Labor, and Production: The Colonial Economy of Spanish and Mexican California,” in Contested Eden: California before the Gold Rush, ed. Ramón A. Gutiérrez and Richard J. Orsi (Berkeley: Univer-

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sity of California Press, 1998), 111–28. Weber, Spanish Frontier, 263 –65. Douglas Monroy, Thrown among Strangers: The Making of Mexican Culture in Frontier California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 109 –17. See also Robert H. Jackson and Edward Castillo, Indians, Franciscans, and Spanish Colonization: The Impact of the Mission System on California Indians (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995), 3 – 40. 71. Manuel Patricio Servín, “California’s Hispanic Heritage: A View into the Spanish Myth,” in New Spain’s Far Northern Frontier, ed. Weber, 120, 127. Lisbeth Haas, Conquests and Historical Identities in California, 1769– 1936 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 30 –32. Douglas Monroy, “The Creation and Re-creation of Californio Society,” in Contested Eden, ed. Gutiérrez and Orsi, 178 –80. 72. Leonard Pitt, The Decline of the Californios: A Social History of Spanishspeaking Californians, 1846 – 1890 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966), 7–11, 86. Weber, Mexican Frontier, 196 –97. Haas, Conquests and Historical Identities, 53. Tomás Almaguer, Racial Fault Lines: The Historical Origins of White Supremacy in California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 47– 49. 73. John R. Chávez, The Lost Land: The Chicano Image of the Southwest (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1984), 45. Almaguer, Racial Fault Lines, 56 –57, 64. 74. Richard Nostrand, “Mexican Americans circa 1850,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 74 (September 1975): 384; and Oscar J. Martínez, “On the Size of the Chicano Population: New Estimates, 1850 –1900,” Aztlán 6 (Spring 1975): 53 –55. Almaguer, Racial Fault Lines, 30 –32. 75. Pitt, Decline of the Californios, 85 –89. Haas, Conquests and Historical Identities, 59, 63 –64. 76. Pitt, Decline of the Californios, 60 –71, 95 –97. Monroy, Thrown among Strangers, 207–19. 77. Almaguer, Racial Fault Lines, 66 –68. Haas, Conquests and Historical Identities, 64 –66. 78. Monroy, Thrown among Strangers, 158 –60. As the pace of Anglo migration quickened, the rate of intermarriage fell from roughly 12 percent in 1850 to under 9 percent in 1880. Almaguer, Racial Fault Lines, 58 –60, 64. 79. Almaguer, Racial Fault Lines, 71–73, 102. Haas, Conquests and Historical Identities, 72 –73. 80. Almaguer, Racial Fault Lines, 29, 71. In 1900 the Mexican population of California was surpassed by the numbers of Native Americans and Chinese. Pitt, Decline of the Californios, 262 –67. Albert Camarillo, Chicanos in a Changing Society: From Mexican Pueblos to American Barrios in Santa Barbara and Southern California, 1848– 1930 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979), 59, 77. David G. Gutiérrez, “Myth and Myopia: Hispanic Peoples and Western History,” in The West: An Illustrated History, ed. Geoffrey C. Ward (Boston: Little, Brown, 1996), 169. George J. Sánchez, Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture, and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900– 1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 70. 81. “New York Citizen Heir to $1,000,000,” New York Herald, April 13, 1905,

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filed in José Felipe Chávez Papers, Box 3, CSWR. Chávez and Espinosa, El Río Abajo, 157–71. On the racial composition of the legislature, see Territory of New Mexico, New Mexico Legislative Manual, 1909 (Santa Fe, 1909), 36; and New Mexico, Sec. of State, New Mexico Blue Book, 1915 (Santa Fe, 1915), 122. 82. Historical Society of New Mexico, No. 31, “Col. Jose Francisco Chaves,” by Paul A. F. Walter (1926), MNM. J. Francisco Chaves to Gen. Edward L. Bartlett, December 29, 1896, Edward L. Bartlett Papers, Box 2, CSWR. See also Tibo J. Chávez, “Colonel Jose Francisco Chavez, 1833 –1904,” Rio Grande History 8 (1978): 6 –9.

Chapter 2. The Race Issue and the “Spanish-American” in Party Politics, 1900 –1920 1. Untitled speech quoted in Paul A. F. Walter, “The Coming of the Railroad,” an address of June 12, 1935, reprinted in El Palacio 39 (July 3 –24, 1935): 2 –3. 2. Ibid., 3. 3. On shootings and vigilantism in Socorro, see Paige W. Christiansen, ed., “Reminiscences of the Socorro Vigilantes,” NMHR 40 (January 1965): 23 –53; and H. P. Collier, “The Mexican War,” July 30, 1936, WPA file A639, Library of Congress. On the violence in San Miguel County, see Robert J. Rosenbaum, Mexicano Resistance in the Southwest: “The Sacred Right of Self-Preservation” (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 99 –135. 4. Democrat Advance, December 31, 1880, William G. Ritch Papers, Box 28, HEH. On violence in California and Texas, see, for example, David J. Weber, ed. and comp., Foreigners in Their Native Land: Historical Roots of the Mexican Americans (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1973), 169 –90; John R. Chávez, The Lost Land: The Chicano Image of the Southwest (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1984), 52 –53; and Douglas Monroy, Thrown among Strangers: The Making of Mexican Culture in Frontier California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 205 –19. 5. On references to the “race question” in Texas, see Neil Foley, The White Scourge: Mexicans, Blacks, and Poor Whites in Texas Cotton Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 106; in Alabama, see Robin D. G. Kelley, “‘We Are Not What We Seem’: Rethinking Black Working-Class Opposition in the Jim Crow South,” JAH 80 (June 1993): 88, n. 28. 6. The compound terms “Spanish-American” and “Hispano-Americano” (also spelled hispanoamericano) were usually hyphenated. 7. Adrian Bustamante, “Los Hispanos: Ethnicity and Social Change in New Mexico” (Ph.D. diss., University of New Mexico, 1982), 89 –94. Ramón Gutiérrez found that mexicano was preferred in the 1830s by only 1 of every 20 people who married legally, the remainder opting for español. Ramón A. Gutiérrez, “Unraveling America’s Hispanic Past: Internal Stratification and Class Boundaries,” Aztlán 17 (Spring 1986): 87. 8. Richard Nostrand, The Hispano Homeland (Norman: University of Okla-

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homa Press, 1992), 15. On Hispano identity, as opposed to terms of identification, see Doris Meyer, Speaking for Themselves: Neomexicano Cultural Identity and the Spanish-Language Press, 1880– 1920 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996), 6; and John Nieto-Phillips, “‘No Other Blood’: History, Language, and Spanish American Ethnic Identity in New Mexico, 1880s– 1920s” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 1997), 36 –37. 9. In some quarters mexicano undoubtedly carried patriotic sentiment, although the intensity of Mexican patriotism among Hispanos remains unclear. Carolyn Zeleny estimates that roughly 1,000 New Mexicans returned to Mexico after the American conquest. Frances Quintana reports that 900 of 1,000 families in the San Miguel del Vado area alone retained their Mexican citizenship. And Anselmo Arellano notes that Hispanos in one town still celebrated Cinco de Mayo, the Mexican national holiday, as late as 1892. Carolyn Zeleny, Relations between Spanish-Americans and Anglo-Americans of New Mexico (New York: Arno Press, 1974), 114; Frances Leon Quintana, Pobladores: Hispanic Americans of the Ute Frontier (n.p., 1991; reprint of Los Primeros Pobladores: Hispanic Americans of the Ute Frontier [Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1974]), 70; and Anselmo F. Arellano, “Through Thick and Thin: Evolutionary Transitions of Las Vegas Grandes and Its Pobladores” (Ph.D. diss., University of New Mexico, 1990), 284. See also Nancie Gonzales, The Spanish-Americans of New Mexico: A Heritage of Pride (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1969), 79. 10. A. Gabriel Meléndez, So All Is Not Lost: The Poetics of Print in Nuevomexicano Communities, 1834 – 1958 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1997), 60, 147. Arellano, “Through Thick and Thin,” 266. 11. Examples appear in excerpts from the SFNM, February 1, 1870, and October 24, 1885, both filed in the Julia K. Shishkin Collection, Box 1, NMSRCA. 12. Daily New Mexican, July 8, 1880, Shishkin Collection, Box 1. Grant, a former president in 1880, was identified in the newspaper by his military rank. 13. The most comprehensive account of this genre is W. W. H. Davis, El Gringo, or New Mexico and Her People (1857; reprint, New York: Arno Press, 1973). See also George Wilkins Kendall, Narrative of the Texan Santa Fé Expedition (1844; reprint, Chicago: Lakeside Press, 1929), 369 –95; Lt. W. H. Emory, Notes on a Military Reconnaissance (1848; reprinted as Lieutenant Emory Reports [Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1951]), 68, 92, 133; John T. Hughes, Doniphan’s Expedition (1847; reprinted as Doniphan’s Expedition, S. Doc. 608, Vol. 22, 63d Cong., 2d sess. [Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1914]), 41; Lewis Garrard, Wah-to-Yah & the Taos Trail (1850; reprint, Palo Alto, Calif.: American West, 1968), 65, 185; and Susan Wallace, The Land of the Pueblos (New York: John B. Alden, 1888), 59. 14. “The native plow,” wrote Davis, “is a unique affair, and appears to be identical with the homely implement used in the time of Moses to turn up the soil of Palestine.” El Gringo, 201. 15. “Views on New Mexico by Mr. Robert Zug, of Colorado,” New York Times, April 19, 1876, Ritch Papers, Scrapbook 6, 96. For overviews of Anglo writing on Hispanos, see Cecil Robinson, Mexico and the Hispanic Southwest in Amer-

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ican Literature (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1977; revised from With the Ears of Strangers [Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1963]); Russell S. Saxton, “Ethnocentrism in the Historical Literature of Territorial New Mexico” (Ph.D. diss., University of New Mexico, 1980); and Susan R. Kenneson, “Through the Looking Glass: A History of Anglo-American Attitudes toward the Spanish-Americans and Indians of New Mexico” (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1978). 16. The “civilized” and “successful” Mexican is described in Charles R. Bliss, “New Mexico,” 1879, Ritch Papers, Scrapbook 8, 184 –85. Katherine Davis, a traveler, wrote that she had “never known a finer people, nor a more hospitable and kindly people.” Davis, “Reminiscences of Travel through New Mexico in the early 1900s,” 7, New Mexico Letters and Diaries Collection, #36, NMSRCA. 17. Scholars conceptualize racial difference in various ways. On the importance of language, see, for example, Thomas C. Holt, “Marking: Race, Racemaking, and the Writing of History,” American Historical Review 100 (February 1995): 1–20; and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, “African-American Women’s History and the Metalanguage of Race,” Signs 17 (Winter 1992): 251– 74. For a materialist approach, see Barbara J. Fields, “Ideology and Race in American History,” in Region, Race, and Reconstruction: Essays in Honor of C. Vann Woodward, ed. J. Morgan Kousser and James M. McPherson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 143 –58; and David Montejano, Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1987), 1–7. On constructions of racial identity in the American West, see Sarah Deutsch, “Landscape of Enclaves: Race Relations in the West, 1865 –1990,” in Under an Open Sky: Rethinking America’s Western Past, ed. William Cronon, George Miles, and Jay Gitlin (New York: Norton, 1992), 110 –31. 18. Santa Fe Republican, September 10, 1847, filed in the Shishkin Collection, Box 1. On nineteenth-century racial ideology, see Peggy Pascoe, “Miscegenation Law, Court Cases, and Ideologies of ‘Race’ in Twentieth-Century America,” Journal of American History 83 (June 1996): 44 –61; and Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial AngloSaxonism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981), 81–228. 19. Gutiérrez, “Unraveling America’s Hispanic Past,” 88. Meyer, Speaking for Themselves, 91. In poking fun at the greedy Anglo, Hispanos even racialized themselves. One common saying in northern New Mexico, told with a healthy dose of irony, was that God had granted americanos the gift of riches and left foolish Mexicans with little more than the ability to enjoy life. “The Golden Image,” told by Higino Tórrez to Lorin Brown, November 9, 1937, WPA #220, NMSRCA. 20. For a similar point, see David J. Weber, ed., Foreigners in Their Native Land: Historical Roots of the Mexican Americans (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1973), 60. 21. On the development of the Black Legend, see Philip Wayne Powell, Tree of Hate: Propaganda and Prejudices Affecting United States Relations with the Hispanic World (New York: Basic Books, 1971), 14 –112. On the legend’s effects,

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see Raymund Paredes, “The Origins of Anti-Mexican Sentiment in the United States,” New Scholar 6 (1977): 139 –65; David J. Weber, “‘Scarce More than Apes’: Historical Roots of Anglo-American Stereotypes of Mexicans in the Border Region,” in New Spain’s Far Northern Frontier: Essays on Spain in the American West, 1540– 1821, ed. David J. Weber (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1979), 293 –307; and “Here Rests Juan Espinosa: Toward a Clearer Look at the Image of the ‘Indolent’ Californios,” WHQ 10 (January 1979): 61–68. 22. James Ohio Pattie, The Personal Narrative of James Ohio Pattie, of Kentucky, ed. Timothy Flint (1831; New York: Arno Press, 1973), 76. Ernest Ruffner, “New Mexico and the New Mexicans,” October 1876, 30, Ritch Papers, Scrapbook 6. 23. “About New Mexico,” Milwaukee Sentinel, February 23, 1877, Ritch Papers, Scrapbook 6, 130. Anonymous article, Ritch Papers, Scrapbook 2, 69. Hispanas in general were perceived by Anglo men with some ambivalence. Although regarded as more appealing than their husbands or brothers, they were nonetheless criticized for smoking, poor hygiene, and immodesty. Anglo women did not always judge their Hispana counterparts so harshly. See, for example, Down the Santa Fé Trail and into Mexico: The Diary of Susan Shelby Magoffin, ed. Stella M. Drumm (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1926), 130 – 31; and Wallace, Land of the Pueblos, 59 –68. See also Beverly Trulio, “AngloAmerican Attitudes toward New Mexican Women,” Journal of the West 12 (April 1973): 229 –39; and Sandra L. Myres, “Mexican Americans and Westering Anglos: A Feminine Perspective,” NMHR 57 (October 1982): 317–33. 24. See, for example, Raymund Paredes, “The Mexican Image in American Travel Literature, 1831–1869,” NMHR 52 (January 1977): 5 –29. 25. Davis, El Gringo, 214 –16. “About New Mexico,” 130. 26. The same political process was at work throughout the greater Southwest. On California, see Antonia I. Castañeda, “Gender, Race, and Culture: Spanish-Mexican Women in the Historiography of Frontier California,” Frontiers 11 (1990): 9. 27. On disparagement of the “Mexican” in other southwestern settings, see Arnoldo De León, They Called Them Greasers: Anglo Attitudes toward Mexicans in Texas, 1821– 1900 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1983), 14 –62; Leonard Pitt, Decline of the Californios: A Social History of Spanish-speaking Californians, 1846 – 1890 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966), 14 –25; and Neil Foley, “Becoming Hispanic: Mexican Americans and the Faustian Pact with Whiteness,” in Reflexiones 1997: New Directions in Mexican American Studies, ed. Neil Foley (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998), 55 –58. On the modern resistance to the “Mexican” and Mexicans in Los Angeles, see Rodolfo Acuña, Anything but Mexican: Chicanos in Contemporary Los Angeles (London: Verso, 1996), 1–17. 28. See, for example, Alfred Robinson, Life in California, during a Residence of Several Years in That Territory (1846; New York: Wiley and Putnam, 1969); Richard Henry Dana, Two Years Before the Mast: A Personal Narrative of Life at Sea (1840; New York: Harper & Row, 1965); and Thomas Jefferson Farnham,

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Travels in the Californias, and Scenes in the Pacific Ocean (1844; New York: Saxon and Miles, 1975). See also Antonia I. Castañeda, “The Political Economy of Nineteenth-Century Stereotypes of Californians,” in Between Borders: Essays on Mexicana/Chicana History, ed. Adelaida R. Del Castillo (Encino, Calif.: Floricanto Press, 1990), 213 –36; and Harry Clark, “Their Pride, Their Manners, and Their Voices: Sources of the Traditional Portrait of Early Californians,” California Historical Quarterly 53 (Spring 1974): 71–82. 29. Guadalupe Vallejo, “Ranch and Mission Days in Alta California,” Century 41 (December 1890): 183. Señorita Encarnación Piñedo, “Early Days in Santa Clara,” San Francisco Bulletin, June 9, 1901, George Wharton James Papers, Box 6, HEH. See also Richard Griswold del Castillo, “The del Valle Family and the Fantasy Heritage,” California History 59 (Spring 1980): 2 –15; Pitt, Decline of the Californios, 289 –90; and Rosaura Sánchez, Telling Identities: The Californio testimonios (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), 57–59, 300 –301. 30. “El sentido de dicho artículo es que los Hispano-Americanos somos una gente sucia, ignorante y degradada, mezcla de indios e iberos. . . . Yo soy Hispano-Americano como lo son los que me escuchan. En mis venas ninguna sangre círcula si no es la que trajo Don Juan de Oñate, y que trajeron después los ilustres antepasados de mi nombre.” La Voz del Pueblo, November 2, 1901, reprinted in Anselmo Arellano, “El Discurso Elocuente Nuevo-Mexicano,” NMSRCA. Snyder’s article was published in the Review, a newspaper in San Miguel County, on October 20, 1901. 31. Profile of Eusebio Chacón in Leland Bradford Prince Papers, Box 2, folder 16, NMSRCA. Meléndez, So All Is Not Lost, 144 – 45. See also Jacqueline Dorgan Meketa, Legacy of Honor: The Life of Rafael Chacón, a NineteenthCentury New Mexican (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1986). 32. The loss of civil rights was no idle threat. Some Anglo migrants, especially those from southern states, looked for ways to make New Mexico run more like Mississippi or Alabama. In 1887, for example, Secretary of the Territory George W. Lane asked Washington whether Article 9 of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which granted Hispanos the rights of citizenship, was binding on the territory. Lane to President Grover Cleveland, February 15, 1887, in Shishkin Collection, Box 2. 33. New Mexico accounted for only 5.7 percent of all Americans in 1920 who claimed Mexican parentage. Thomas D. Boswell, “The Growth and Proportional Redistribution of the Mexican Stock Population Born in the United States: 1910 –1970,” Mississippi Geographer 7 (Spring 1979): 57–67. See also David G. Gutiérrez, Walls and Mirrors: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the Politics of Ethnicity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 45. 34. Nostrand, Hispano Homeland, 163 –64. On friction between nativos and Mexican immigrants, see Helen Zunser, “A New Mexican Village,” Journal of American Folklore 48 (1935): 141. 35. “Resoluciones de Indignación,” Prince Collection, Hispano/Anglo Re-

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lations file. Francisco Ramírez, editor of El Clamor Público, declared during racial attacks of the 1850s that “California is lost to all Spanish-Americans.” Quoted in Chávez, The Lost Land, 46 – 47. 36. Quoted in Meléndez, So All Is Not Lost, 66. Anselmo Arellano argues that the usage of Hispano grew in the 1880s. Similarly, Adrian Bustamante found an increase in the usage of hispano-americano in La Voz del Pueblo in the 1890s. Those increases coincided with the 1894 founding of La Alianza HispanoAmericana in Tucson and the 1898 reorganization of El Casino HispanoAmericana in Las Vegas. See Arellano, “Through Thick and Thin,” 267–68; and Bustamante, “Los Hispanos,” 125 –26. On the Mexican image and Anglo progressives, see Mario T. García, “Americanization and the Mexican Immigrant, 1880 –1930,” Journal of Ethnic Studies 6 (Summer 1978): 19 –34. 37. Meyer, Speaking for Themselves, 42, 89 –110. On the leading role of the Spanish-language press, see Meléndez, So All Is Not Lost, 3 –12. Chacón’s admonition appeared in La Voz del Pueblo, February 28, 1898, and is quoted in Francisco Lomelí, “Eusebio Chacón: An Early Pioneer of the New Mexican Novel,” in Pasó por Aquí: Critical Essays on the New Mexican Literary Tradition, 1542– 1988, ed. Erlinda Gonzales-Berry (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1989), 164 –65, n. 3. 38. SFNM, May 10, 1902, quoted in Oliver La Farge, Santa Fe: The Autobiography of a Southwestern Town (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1959), 178. 39. In 1889 GOP stalwart L. Bradford Prince complained to President Benjamin Harrison about the lack of Hispano appointments: “Thus far under this Administration none have been appointed, and this is already being made a subject of criticism by our opponents . . . .[I]t is certain that if some recognition is not extended to this element, that fact will work very disadvantageously to the Republicans in the next election.” Prince to Harrison, July 1889, Prince Papers, Box 2. 40. Otero was the cousin of Manuel B. Otero, the landowner who was gunned down by James Whitney in 1883. As one Anglo Republican colleague told him, “[Y]ou are native enough to please our native citizens and American (so-called) enough . . . that you will make an able, intelligent and thoroughly conscientious Governor.” Bernard S. Rodey to Otero, June 2, 1897, Miguel Antonio Otero Papers, Box 1, folder 3, CSWR. Otero also benefited from having met McKinley at the national Republican convention in 1892. The life of Miguel A. Otero II is recounted in the governor’s autobiographic trilogy: My Life on the Frontier, 1864 – 1882 (New York: Press of the Pioneers, 1935); My Life on the Frontier, 1882– 1897 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1939); and My Nine Years as Governor of the Territory of New Mexico, 1897– 1906 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1940). 41. “[E]l atentado de levantar al pueblo nativo y elevarlo á un plano con el carácter americano es tarea desesperada. El mexicano, en opinión nuestra, está condenado y destinado á desaparecer come el indio. Es un pueblo indolente y no parace tener ni la energía del indio ni la vida intelectual del español.” Quoted

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in “A Los Hispano Americanos de Nuevo México,” El Boletín Popular, November 14, 1885. The Catholic’s attack, which is no longer available in original form, was reprinted in El Boletín. 42. “[N]uestros amigos hispano americanos del vecino territorio se han ofendido cuando no se pensaba ofendérseles. . . . [N]unca ha sido de aquellos que han hecho uso del desdeñose epíteto ‘mexicano’ para denotar el pueblo de sangre española en Nuevo México.” Ibid. 43. “[E]l epíteto desdeñoso es un timbre de gloria, a cuya altura nunca llegerá Malone ni los pequeños de su calibre.” “Apologia,” ibid. Malone was editor of the Catholic. 44. O. D. Barrett to Gen. [Benjamin Butler], July 21, 1890, and Gov. W. T. Thornton to Secretary of the Interior, September 29, 1894, in Shishkin Collection, Box 2. Butler, although working with the Boston law firm of Lashburn and Webster, apparently acted on behalf of the U.S. Dept. of the Interior. 45. Rosenbaum, Mexicano Resistance, 108, 126 –28. 46. Address of Felix Martínez quoted in Foreigners in Their Native Land, ed. Weber, 236 –38. See also Robert Rankin White, “Felix Martinez: A Borderlands Success Story,” El Palacio 87 (Winter 1981): 13 –17. On C. de Baca see Meléndez, So All Is Not Lost, 77–81. 47. Undated newspaper excerpt, Las Vegas Daily Optic, in Shiskin Collection, Box 2, folder 15. 48. Meyer, Speaking for Themselves, 73, 98. “Nuestra Platforma,” in Foreigners in Their Native Land, ed. Weber, 234 –35. 49. Meléndez, So All Is Not Lost, 109. On the importance of manhood in the nineteenth century, see Mark C. Carnes, Secret Ritual and Manhood in Victorian America (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1989), 11–14. On manhood and its relationship to a white civilization, see Gail Bederman, Manliness & Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880– 1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 5 –31. 50. J. M. H. Alarid, “Al pueblo Neo-Mexicano,” quoted in Meléndez, So All Is Not Lost, 40. 51. W. A. Hawkins to Gov. E. G. Ross, December 11, 1892, Edmund G. Ross Papers, Box 1, folder 12, CSWR. A most thorough account of the statehood struggle is Robert Larson, New Mexico’s Quest for Statehood, 1846 – 1912 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1968). For a fascinating study of national attitudes, as depicted in political cartoons, see Richard Melzer, “New Mexico in Caricature: Images of the Territory on the Eve of Statehood,” NMHR 62 (October 1987): 335 –60. 52. Emphasis in original. Quoted in Larson, New Mexico’s Quest, 72 –73. New York Evening Post, March 1, 1876, Ritch Papers, Scrapbook 6, 102. “New Mexico: The Illiterate Legislators of the Territory,” St. Louis Republican, January 21, 1876, filed in Ritch Papers, Scrapbook 6, 93. 53. Larson, New Mexico’s Quest, 200 –207. 54. Amador quoted in U.S. Senate Committee on Territories, Hearings on House Bill 12543, 57 Cong., 2d. sess., December 10, 1902, S. Doc. 36, 104. U.S.

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Senate, Committee on the Territories, New Statehood Bill, S. Rept. 2206, 57th Cong., 2d sess., 1902, 5 –9. 55. Quoted in Larson, New Mexico’s Quest, 124, 148. 56. L. Bradford Prince, “The People of New Mexico and Their Territory,” New York Times, February 28, 1882. “Junta de Indignación de los Ciudadanos de Las Vegas,” unidentified clipping of story published in El Boletín Popular, April 19, 1888, in Prince Papers, Box 2, file 30. 57. Excerpt from SFNM, May 10, 1902, quoted in La Farge, Santa Fe, 178. B. S. Rodey, “New Mexico’s Brave Fight for Statehood,” Houston Daily Post, September 20, 1903, in Rodey Papers. Undated 1906 newspaper clipping, Statehood Scrapbook, n.p., George Pritchard Papers, NMSRCA. 58. Otero interview with William E. Curtis, July 1, 1905, in Otero Papers, Box 4, folder 3, CSWR. W. A. Fleming Jones, “Conservation in New Mexico,” SFNM, September 21, 1909. 59. “Topics of the Times,” New York Times, August 24, 1898. The correspondent’s letter is quoted in Graeme S. Mount, “Hispanic New Mexicans and the Spanish-American War of 1898,” 7, unpublished paper #148, NMSRCA. 60. Otero to Hilario L. Ortiz, May 13, 1898, quoted in Mount, “Hispanic New Mexicans,” 3. On figures, see Graeme S. Mount, “Nuevo Mexicanos and the War of 1898,” NMHR 58 (October 1983): 388 –89. The low enlistment figures are best explained by Hispanos’ indirect stake in the conflict. Unlike the Civil War, in which record numbers of New Mexicans rushed to battle against Texas Confederates, the conflict with Spain was considered of little relevance to their daily lives. See Arellano, “Through Thick and Thin,” 365 –81. 61. Arellano, “Through Thick and Thin,” 369. Undated excerpt from Harper’s Weekly, A. M. Bergere Family Papers, Scrapbook 117, NMSRCA. 62. “American to the Core,” undated clipping, Pueblo Chieftain; “How America Assimilates Races,” undated clipping, St. Louis Globe-Democrat; and “New Mexico and Statehood,” undated clipping, Denver News, in Bergere Family Papers, Scrapbook 117. 63. “Habla ‘El Tucson Citizen,’” El Mensajero, December 1, 1911, 3. SFNM, September 23, 1911, 4. 64. Otero to Jesse G. Northcutt, November 17, 1900, Otero Papers, Box 2. 65. For insight into the Old Guard, see Richard Lowitt, Bronson M. Cutting: Progressive Politician (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1992), 45 –63. One prominent Democrat claimed that New Mexico’s most powerful corporations owned tens of millions of dollars in property but, with the help of the Old Guard, were assessed at only two hundred thousand. H. B. Fergusson, “The Constitution: Its Dangers and Defects,” Holm Bursum Papers, Box 6, folder 1, CSWR. 66. On the GOP’s Spanish-speaking support, see Charles Judah, The Republican Party in New Mexico (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1949), 12 –13; and Lowitt, Bronson M. Cutting, 93. On the convention, see Reuben W. Heflin, “New Mexico’s Constitutional Convention,” NMHR 21 (January 1946): 60 –68; and Larson, New Mexico’s Quest, 272 –86.

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67. Harvey Butler Fergusson to Hon. Antonio Lucero, July 30, 1910; to J. H. Crist, November 29, 1910; and to J. H. McCasland, September 21, 1911, Harvey B. Fergusson Papers, CSWR. Fergusson’s son describes his father’s ideas about racial superiority in Harvey Fergusson, Home in the West: An Inquiry into My Origins (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1944), 67. See also Calvin A. Roberts, “H. B. Fergusson, 1848 –1915: New Mexican Spokesman for Political Reform,” NMHR 57 (July 1982): 237–55. 68. “The Guileful and Aromatic Greaser,” reprinted by the SFNM, May 18, 1906, and quoted in Rosenbaum, Mexicano Resistance, 97. Enrique Salazar, “Nuevo México y sus enemigos internos,” El Independiente, April 18, 1907, quoted in Meyer, Speaking for Themselves, 107–8. Thirteenth Census of the United States, vol. 3: Population, 171. 69. “Democratic Rally,” in unidentified Roswell, New Mex., newspaper, September 29, 1906, Octaviano A. Larrazolo Papers, folder 12, CSWR. Larrazolo to Hon. W. C. McDonald, August 29, 1911, reprinted in Alfred C. Córdova and Charles B. Judah, Octaviano Larrazolo: A Political Portrait (Albuquerque: Department of Government, University of New Mexico, 1952), 8 –10. Larrazolo speech at “Great Statehood Rally,” William Henry Andrews Papers, Scrapbook 4, 15, CSWR. For background, see Paul F. Larrazolo, Octaviano A. Larrazolo: A Moment in New Mexico History (New York: Carlton Press, 1986). 70. Quoted in Córdova and Judah, Octaviano Larrazolo, 7–8, 13. “Larrazolo Heartily Greeted in Capital City Alike by Democrats and Republicans,” Albuquerque Morning Journal, December 22, 1910, in Larrazolo Papers, folder 14. Quoted in Gonzales, “The Political Construction of Latino Nomenclatures in Twentieth-Century New Mexico,” JSW 35 (summer 1993): 166. 71. “The Transformation,” SFNM, January 22, 1912. “Republican Hosts Meet in State Convention,” SFNM, March 8, 1912. L. B. Prince, “The Race Issue: Opportunities for Native New Mexicans,” Prince Papers, Box 2. 72. Noll J. Neills to Louis Armijo [sic], October 10, 1918, Luis E. Armijo Papers, Box 1, folder 10, NMSRCA. 73. Albert B. Fall to Charles Springer, May 25, 1914; and Holm Bursum to Fall, May 13, 1916, Albert B. Fall Papers, Boxes 37 and 15, respectively, HEH. 74. “Who Gave the Spanish Americans the Square Deal?” SFNM, January 18, 1912. 75. C. de Baca to J. P. Dunleavy, March 21, 1913, Ezéquiel C. de Baca Papers, Politics and Government, 1913, NMSRCA. On C. de Baca, see Meléndez, So All Is Not Lost, 84 –86; and Anselmo Arellano and Julian Josue Vigil, Las Vegas Grandes on the Gallinas, 1835– 1985 (Las Vegas, New Mex.: Editorial Teleraña, 1985), 21–35. 76. To the Democrats’ dismay, the plan backfired. McDonald lost the election for lieutenant governor, and C. de Baca’s death brought a Republican into the statehouse. On the Democrats’ gambit, see E. B. Fincher, SpanishAmericans as a Political Factor in New Mexico, 1912– 1950 (New York: Arno Press, 1974), 214 –15; and Frank Hubbell to Charles Safford, September 2, 1916, Fall Papers, Box 24, folder 2. On electoral returns, see Jack E. Holmes, Politics in New Mexico (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1967), 42 – 44.

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77. “Character Sketch of Democratic Nominee for Governor,” a report on Garcia from J. P. Looney to B. F. Seggerson, October 2, 1918, Bronson M. Cutting Papers, Box 17, Library of Congress. “Gentleman from State of Mississippi Gets in Bad,” SFNM, September 27, 1918. 78. Justine Ward to Bronson Cutting, October 7, 1918, and November 2, 1918, Cutting Papers, Box 17. “Fall and Larrazolo Last Night Result,” SFNM, October 3, 1918. M. A. Otero to Cutting, December 12, 1918, Cutting Papers, Box 4. 79. Bursum to Larrazolo, March 23, 1919, and T. B. Leftwich to Bursum, January 11, 1920, Bursum Papers, Box 8, folders 1 and 4, respectively. Excerpt from SFNM, September 10, 1920, Larrazolo Papers, Scrapbook, n.p. Córdova and Judah, Octaviano Larrazolo, 30. 80. “Crocodile Tears Fail to Move Canny Spanish-American Legislators,” Albuquerque Evening Herald, January 27, 1912, in John Baron Burg Papers, Scrapbook, CSWR. 81. Excerpt from Albuquerque Journal, October 31, 1911, in Cutting Papers, Scrapbook, 1911, Box 105. “Una Pregunta á La Voz del Pueblo,” El Independiente, February 8, 1912, Larrazolo Papers, Box 1, folder 12. 82. [“seguramente estan arruinando a nuestra raza . . .”] Manuel U. Vigil to L. E. Armijo, June 13, 1913, Armijo Papers, Box 1, folder 5. [“Yo creo que el dia no está muy lejos cuando en vez de estar en la mayoria estaremos en la triste minoria y cuando ese tiempo haya llegado tendremos ‘que pagar.’” (sic)] Armijo to Vigil, June 19, 1913, Armijo Papers, Box 2, folder 15. 83. Otero to Fall, January 29, 1922, Fall Papers, Box 30. “Natives Ask Half of Ticket,” SFNM, September 2, 1926. Hispano Democrats eventually settled for five positions. “Republicans Put Up Ticket Today,” SFNM, September 12, 1928. “Ex-Governor Declares He’ll Run for Senate if Ticket Is Divided,” Albuquerque Journal, September 12, 1928, Larrazolo Papers, folder 26. Paul A. F. Walter, “Octaviano Ambrosio Larrazolo,” NMHR 7 (April 1932): 97–104. 84. Signatories to letter addressed to W. P. Woolridge, June 28, 1916, in my private possession. The historian Marc Simmons graciously provided me with a copy. 85. “. . . sea modelo para los futuros gobrenadores y ensénale al mundo que los ispanos americanos son capasesno solo para gobernar un estano [sic],” Cipriano Lujan, September 8, 1916; “. . . es un grande honor para nuestro pueblo ispano americano tener á la cabeza uno de nuestra propia sangre [sic],” Anastasio Manzanares, November 13, 1916; Anonymous, January 15, 1917; and “. . . un Consul de espanos Americanos [sic],” J. P. Mondragón, January 4, 1917, C. de Baca Papers. 86. “Club Politico Is Pleased with Ticket,” SFNM, September 14, 1928. Walter V. Woehlke, “The New Day in New Mexico: Race Prejudice and Boss-Rule Are Yielding to Progress in This Ancient Commonwealth,” Sunset 46 (June 1921): 22 –23. For a thorough discussion of Hispano protests, see Phillip B. Gonzales, “La Junta de Indignación: Hispano Repertoire of Collective Protest in New Mexico, 1884 –1933,” WHQ 31 (Summer 2000): 161–86.

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Chapter 3. Mission Architecture and Colonial Civility, 1904-1920 1. Edgar Lee Hewett, “Spain the Motherland,” El Palacio 6 (February 8, 1919): 63. 2. F. A. Bather, “The Art Museum of New Mexico,” Museums Journal 17 (March 1918): 139 – 40, School of American Research Collection, folder 68, NMSRCA. See also R. P. Crawford, “Discovering a Real American Art: Santa Fe’s Unique Gallery of Art,” Scribner’s Magazine 73 (March 1923): 380 –84. 3. Central to Victorian culture was a middle-class Protestant commitment to moral regulation and improvement. See Daniel Walker Howe, “Victorian Culture in America,” in Victorian America, ed. Daniel Walker Howe (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1976), 3 –28. On Victorian culture and architecture in the West, see C. Robert Haywood, Victorian West: Class and Culture in Kansas Cattle Towns (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1991), esp. 47– 52. See also William H. Wilson, The City Beautiful Movement (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 1–6. 4. On romantic aesthetics, regional identity, and tourism in Santa Fe, see Chris Wilson, The Myth of Santa Fe: Creating a Modern Regional Tradition (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1997), 110 – 45; and Chris Wilson, “New Mexico in the Tradition of Romantic Reaction,” in Pueblo Style and Regional Architecture, ed. Nicholas C. Markovich, Wolfgang F. E. Preiser, and Fred G. Sturm (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1990), 175 –81. 5. Prompted less by social unrest than by the reputation of paisano backwardness, the civilizing function of Santa Fe’s new architecture differed from that of northeastern and midwestern national guard armories, buildings whose design proclaimed that disorder would be quelled at all costs. See Robert M. Fogelson, America’s Armories: Architecture, Society, and Public Order (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), 13 –82. 6. Hewett, “Spain the Motherland,” 63. The quotation, which paraphrases Hewett’s address, probably represents the voice of Hewett’s assistant, Paul Walter. 7. Quoted in Arnold L. Rodríguez, O.F.M., “New Mexico in Transition,” NMHR 24 (July 1949): 184; and Thomas E. Chávez, ed., An Illustrated History of New Mexico (Niwot: University Press of Colorado, 1992), 125. 8. New Mexico Bureau of Immigration, San Miguel County (Santa Fe, 1901), n.p., cataloged in Territorial Archives of New Mexico, Reel 96, NMSRCA (hereafter TANM–96). William G. Ritch, New Mexico, Its Resources and Advocates (Santa Fe, 1882), n.p., TANM–96. Albert J. Fountain, Report of Doña Ana County (Santa Fe, 1882), n.p., TANM–96. H. B. Henning, The Central Rio Grande Valley of New Mexico (Santa Fe, 1908), 26, TANM–96. William G. Ritch, Illustrated New Mexico, 5th ed. (Santa Fe, 1885), preface, 23. See also Herbert H. Lang, “The New Mexico Bureau of Immigration, 1880 –1912,” NMHR 51 (July 1976): 193 –214. Hispano members of the bureau included its vice president in 1884, Mariano Otero, and the speaker of the Territorial House, Amado Chaves.

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9. Terry Jon Lehmann, “Santa Fe and Albuquerque, 1870 –1900: Contrast and Conflict in the Development of Two Southwestern Towns” (Ph.D. diss., Indiana University, 1974), 224. “Tertio-Millennial,” SFNM, December 11, 1882, Shishkin Collection, Box 1. Wayne Mauzy, “The Tertio-Millennial Exposition,” El Palacio 37 (December 12, 19, 26, 1934): 185 –99. Prominent backers of the exposition included L. B. Prince, Arthur Boyle, secretary of the Santa Fe Chamber of Commerce, merchants Solomon Spiegelberg and Abraham Staab, and T. B. Catron. The Hispanos Romulo Martínez and Major José Sena, a wellknown soldier, also participated. 10. The Santa Fe New Mexican Review and the historian Ralph Emerson Twitchell, quoted in Mauzy, “The Tertio-Millennial Exposition,” 186, 193. Walt Whitman, “The Spanish Element in Our Nationality,” quoted in El Palacio 5 (September 7, 1918): 164 –65. Advertising copy in my private papers, kindly provided by Marta Weigle. 11. Lehmann, “Santa Fe and Albuquerque,” 228 –29. Ralph Emerson Twitchell, Old Santa Fe: The Story of New Mexico’s Ancient Capital (1925; Chicago: Rio Grande Press, 1963), 401. Mauzy, “The Tertio-Millennial Exposition,” 194 –96. 12. The changing perceptions of Indians are discussed by Anne Farrar Hyde, An American Vision: Far Western Landscape and National Culture, 1820– 1920 (New York: New York University Press, 1990), 229 –30; and Robert A. Trennert, “Fairs, Expositions, and the Changing Image of Southwestern Indians, 1876 – 1904,” NMHR 62 (April 1987): 127–28. On the artistic and literary treatment of Indians, see Lee Clark Mitchell, Witnesses to a Vanishing America: The Nineteenth-Century Response (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1981), esp. 95 –109. On the Anglo pursuit of the primitive Indian, see Leah Dilworth, Imagining Indians in the Southwest: Persistent Visions of a Primitive Past (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1996); and Curtis Hinsley, “Zunis and Brahmins: Cultural Ambivalence in the Gilded Age,” in Romantic Motives: Essays on Anthropological Sensibility, ed. George W. Stocking, Jr. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 169 –207. 13. Hinsley, “Zunis and Brahmins,” 174. On connections with the imagined Orient, see Barbara Babcock, “‘A New Mexico Rebecca’: Imaging Pueblo Women,” JSW 32 (Winter 1990): 400 –37. 14. On the popularity of the legend, see Marta Weigle, “From Desert to Disney World: The Santa Fe Railway and the Fred Harvey Company Display the Indian Southwest,” Journal of Anthropological Research 45 (Spring 1989): 117–20. See also Marta Weigle and Peter White, The Lore of New Mexico (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1988), 69 –73. 15. William G. Ritch, Aztlán: The History, Resources and Attractions of New Mexico (Boston: Lothrop and Co., 1885), 5. Ritch also made reference to Montezuma in an 1881 bureau publication, “The Resources of New Mexico,” and in previous editions of Aztlán titled Illustrated New Mexico. See also Ramón Gutiérrez, “Aztlán, Montezuma, and New Mexico: The Political Uses of American Indian Mythology,” in Aztlán: Essays on the Chicano Homeland, ed. Rudolfo

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Anaya and Francisco Lomelí (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1989), 172 –90. Susan Wallace, The Land of the Pueblos (New York: John B. Alden, 1888), 33, 232 –36. Robert W. Larson, New Mexico’s Quest for Statehood, 1846 – 1912 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1968), 149. On the American fascination with Aztec civilization, see Benjamin Keen, The Aztec Image in Western Thought (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1971), 217–553. 16. Earl Pomeroy, In Search of the Golden West: The Tourist in Western America (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1957), 31– 40. In 1881 the Atlantic and Pacific Railway, which later merged with the Santa Fe, began to photograph Indians and villages near construction sites. The photos are found in the Atlantic and Pacific Railway Papers, CSWR. On the initial strategy of the Santa Fe, see Dilworth, Imagining Indians, 16 –17. 17. The former tourist mode is captured in “Tourists,” an unidentified newspaper clipping, ca. 1883, Shishkin Collection, Box 2. The railway’s change in strategy is discussed in Marta Weigle, “Exposition and Mediation: Mary Colter, Erna Fergusson, and the Santa Fe/Harvey Popularization of the Native Southwest, 1902 –1940,” Frontiers 12, no. 3 (1992): 119 –20; Dilworth, Imagining Indians, 80 –82; and T. C. McLuhan, Dream Tracks: The Railroad and the American Indian, 1890– 1930 (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1985), 16 –23. On Fred Harvey and his company, see Bertha P. Dutton, “Commerce on a New Frontier: The Fred Harvey Company and the Fred Harvey Fine Arts Collection,” in Colonial Frontiers: Art and Life in Spanish New Mexico, ed. Christine Mather (Santa Fe: Ancient City Press, 1983), 91–94. 18. Helen Hunt Jackson, Ramona (New York: Signet, 1988), 11–23. Helen Hunt Jackson, “Father Junipero and His Work,” Century 26 (May 1883): 200. See also Michele Moylan, “Reading the Indians: The Ramona Myth in American Culture,” Prospects 18 (1993): 153 –87; Kevin Starr, Inventing the Dream: California through the Progressive Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 60 –63; and Franklin Walker, A Literary History of Southern California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1950), 128 –32. 19. Margaret V. Allen, Ramona’s Homeland (Chula Vista, Calif.: Denrich Press, 1914); Elizabeth B. Bohan, “Rancho Guajome: The Real Home of Ramona”; Charles Lummis, The Home of Ramona (Los Angeles: Charles F. Lummis & Co., 1888); and Ramona Pageant Association, “Ramona, California’s Greatest Outdoor Play,” ca. 1930, all filed at HEH. See also T. P. Getz, “The Story of Ramona’s Marriage Place,” ca. 1890, HEH; and A. C. Vroman and C. F. Barnes, The Genesis of the Story of Ramona (Los Angeles: Kingsley-Barnes & Neuner Co., 1899). For background, see Carey McWilliams, Southern California Country: An Island on the Land (New York: Duell, Sloan & Pearce, 1949), 71–77; and Phoebe S. Kropp, “‘All Our Yesterdays’: The Spanish Fantasy Past and the Politics of Public Memory in Southern California, 1884 –1939” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, San Diego, 1999), 17–22. 20. On Harte, see John R. Chávez, The Lost Land: The Chicano Image of the Southwest (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1984), 89. On the Mediterranean motif, see Walker, Literary History, 118 –20; and Starr, Inventing the Dream, 45 – 46.

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21. “Centennial of Padre Junípero Serra,” August 24, 1884, Del Valle Family Papers, file 997, Seaver Center, Los Angeles. Antonio Coronel to Rev. J. Adams, April 11, 1889, Antonio F. Coronel Correspondence, HEH. 22. Glenn S. Dumke, The Boom of the Eighties in Southern California (San Marino, Calif.: Henry E. Huntington Library, 1944), 9 –27. Robert M. Fogelson, The Fragmented Metropolis: Los Angeles, 1850– 1930 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967), 63 –84. Norman Stanley, No Little Plans: The Story of the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce (n.p., 1956), 5 –20. 23. Stanley, No Little Plans, 13. Mary Austin, Earth Horizon (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1932), 229. 24. Edwards Roberts, Santa Barbara and Around There (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1886), 151, HEH. Charles A. Keeler, Southern California (Los Angeles: Passenger Dept., Santa Fe Railway, 1899), 91. “San Gabriel Valley: The Heart of Southern California,” April 17, 1891, 6, HEH. See also James J. Rawls, “The California Mission as Symbol and Myth,” California History 71 (Fall 1992): 343 –60. 25. Alice P. Adams, “San Gabriel,” in A Southern California Paradise, ed. R. W. C. Farnsworth (Pasadena, Calif.: n.p., 1883), 24. Anonymous, “The Mission of Santa Barbara,” Santa Barbara 1 (January 1906): 14. Mary A. Graham, Historical Reminiscences of One Hundred Years Ago (San Francisco: P. J. Thomas, 1876), 18 –19. 26. On Harvard’s role in the development of a masculine ethos, see Kim Townsend, Manhood at Harvard: William James and Others (New York: Norton, 1996), 15 –25. 27. A comprehensive biography of Lummis is long overdue. For useful background, see Turbese Lummis Fiske and Keith Lummis, Charles F. Lummis: The Man and His West (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1975); and Edwin R. Bingham, Charles F. Lummis, Editor of the Southwest (San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1955; Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1973). An incisive recent study of Lummis’s writing is Martin Padget, “Travel, Exoticism, and the Writing of Charles Fletcher Lummis and the ‘Creation’ of the Southwest,” JSW 37 (Autumn 1995): 421– 49. 28. Charles Lummis, Stand Fast Santa Barbara! (Santa Barbara: Community Arts Association, 1923), 3 – 4, HEH. 29. Charles Lummis, Flowers of Our Lost Romance (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1929), xiv. 30. Ibid., 274. Lummis to Boaz Walton Long, April 14, 1924, Long Papers, NMSRCA. Starr, Inventing the Dream, 75 –98. 31. Lummis, Stand Fast Santa Barbara! 4 –5. 32. Mission Revival is generally considered the first phase of the broader architectural movement known as the Spanish Colonial Revival. The second phase, which took off in the teens and ran to the Great Depression, featured an eclectic mix of grandiose motifs most conveniently labeled Mediterranean. See David Gebhard, “The Spanish Colonial Revival in Southern California, 1895 – 1930,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 26 (May 1967): 131–32. 33. Robert W. Rydell, All the World’s a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International Expositions, 1876 – 1916 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,

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1984), 128. David Hurst Thomas, “Harvesting Ramona’s Garden: Life in California’s Mythical Mission Past,” in Columbian Consequences, vol. 1: The Spanish Borderlands in Pan-American Perspective, ed. David Hurst Thomas (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991), 122. David Gebhard, “Architectural Imagery, the Mission and California,” Harvard Review of Architecture 1 (Spring 1980): 137. 34. Quoted in Karen J. Weitze, “Origins and Early Development of the Mission Revival in California” (Ph.D. diss., Stanford University, 1978), 76. See 70 –77. 35. Karen J. Weitze, California’s Mission Revival (Los Angeles: Hennessey & Ingalls, 1984), 55 –66. 36. Weitze, “Origins and Early Development of the Mission Revival,” 166 – 72; and California’s Mission Revival, 84. Starr, Inventing the Dream, 91. Quoted in Lummis, Stand Fast Santa Barbara! 12. 37. Paul A. F. Walter to Gov. A. W. Hockenhull, March 24, 1934, Walter Papers, Box 123, MNM. On the history of Spanish missions in New Mexico, see John L. Kessell and Rick Hendricks, eds., The Spanish Missions of New Mexico, 2 vols. (New York: Garland, 1991). 38. Beatrice Chauvenet, “Paul A. F. Walter: A Man Who Lived and Wrote Santa Fe History,” El Palacio 88 (Spring 1982): 29 –34. 39. New Mexico Bureau of Immigration, The Land of Sunshine: A Handbook of the Resources, Products, Industries, and Climate of New Mexico, 1906 ed., ed. Max Frost and Paul A. F. Walter (Santa Fe: New Mexico Printing Co., 1906), 183. 40. Ibid. 41. Christopher Wilson, “The Spanish Pueblo Revival Defined, 1904 –1921,” New Mexico Studies in the Fine Arts 7 (1982): 24 –25. Quoted in Virginia L. Grattan, Mary Colter: Builder upon the Red Earth (Flagstaff, Ariz.: Northland Press, 1980), 10. 42. Quoted in Weigle, “Exposition and Mediation,” 126. Grattan, Mary Colter, 14. See also Claire Shephard-Lanier, “Trading on Tradition: Mary Jane Colter and the Romantic Appeal of Harvey House Architecture,” JSW 38 (Summer 1996): 163 –95. 43. On the “staging” of Indian authenticity at the Alvarado, see Weigle, “From Desert to Disney World,” 120 –26. For a conceptual discussion of “staged authenticity,” see Dean MacCannell, The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class (New York: Schocken Books, 1976; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 91–107. 44. SFNM, February 19, 1910. On the “adobe town,” see Oliver La Farge, Santa Fe: The Autobiography of a Southwestern Town (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1959), 138. The local newspaper responded pathetically to the insult by listing the number of bricks (3.5 million) used in each building project that year. Santa Fe’s woes are discussed in Twitchell, Old Santa Fe, 387–98; and Wilson, The Myth of Santa Fe, 75 –76. On Las Vegas, see Anselmo Arellano and Julian Josue Vigil, Las Vegas Grandes on the Gallinas, 1835– 1985 (Las Vegas, New Mex.: Editorial Telaraña, 1985), 42 – 47; on Albuquerque, Marc Simmons, Al-

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buquerque: A Narrative History (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1982), 201–338. 45. Lehmann, “Santa Fe and Albuquerque,” 252. SFNM, July 12, 1887, quoted in La Farge, Santa Fe, 131. Lordsburg Western Liberal excerpted by SFNM, May 24, 1892; and “Colonel Chávez Capitol Speech,” SFNM, July 2, 1885, New Mexico WPA, Box 10, folder 98, NMSRCA. 46. “Santa Fe Must Spruce Up,” SFNM, August 23, 1909; and “Santa Fe Will Not Be Sandbagged,” SFNM, February 6, 1912. Paul A. F. Walter, “Santa Fe County, New Mexico,” 1909, 42, Twentieth-Century Travel Literature Pamphlets, CSWR. Wilson, The Myth of Santa Fe, 79. 47. Inaugural address of W. G. Ritch, Prince Papers, folder 4. L.A.’s success was cited in “Let Santa Fe Learn,” SFNM, January 7, 1910; and “Come, Let’s!” SFNM, January 26, 1910. Collier, whose address appears in “An Expert’s Advice,” SFNM, March 27, 1912, supervised the organization of the 1915 PanamaCalifornia Exposition. See Rydell, All the World’s a Fair, 214 –20. 48. Reference to the town’s streets appeared in SFNM, October 18, 1873, Shishkin Collection, Box 1, folder 6. H. H. Dorman, Chairman of the City Planning Board, to Hon. Mayor of Chicago, March 18, 1912; Sylvanus Morley to Hon. George Armijo, September 10, 1912; to George Webster, September 26, 1912; and to Simpson, September 9, 1912, Weiss and Loomis Collection of Santa Fe City Planning Board Records, MNM. Wilson, The Myth of Santa Fe, 121–23. On the work of the planning board, see Nicholas C. Markovich, “Santa Fe Renaissance: City Planning and Stylistic Preservation,” in Pueblo Style and Regional Architecture, ed. Markovich, Preiser, and Sturm, 197–212. On the transformation of other towns into historic tourist sites, see Martha K. Norkunas, The Politics of Public Memory: Tourism, History, and Ethnicity in Monterey, California (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 23 –73; and John D. Dorst, The Written Suburb: An American Site, an Ethnographic Dilemma (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989), 101–72. 49. Christopher Wilson, “The Santa Fe, New Mexico Plaza: An Architectural and Cultural History” (Master’s thesis, University of New Mexico, 1981), 107. 50. SFNM, July 17, 1891, quoted in Wilson, “The Santa Fe Plaza,” 101. Wilson, The Myth of Santa Fe, 67–71. 51. “What Is Lacking?” SFNM, July 1, 1911; and Harry Dorman to E. G. Routzahn, April 15, 1913, Weiss/Loomis Collection, folder 11. 52. On vernacular adobe houses, see Beverly Spears, American Adobes: Rural Houses of Northern New Mexico (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1986); and Bainbridge Bunting, Taos Adobes: Spanish Colonial and Territorial Architecture of the Taos Valley (Santa Fe: Museum of New Mexico Press, 1964), 1–14. 53. Santa Fe City Council to Mayor Celso López, ca. December 1912, 3, Weiss/Loomis Collection, folder 3. 54. S. G. Morley to I. H. Rapp, September 20, 1912, Weiss/Loomis Collection, folder 6. Carl D. Sheppard, Creator of the Santa Fe Style: Issac Hamilton

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Rapp, Architect (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1988), 59, 76 – 77. The warehouse was designed by Rapp for C. M. Schenk, owner of the Colorado Supply Company. Schenk admired the Acoma church and instructed Rapp to use it as a model. “The Colorado Supply Company. Pictorial Pamphlet—Advertisement,” School of American Research Collection, folder 17. 55. Sylvanus Griswold Morley, “Santa Fe Architecture,” Old Santa Fe 2 (January 1915): 278 –83. In determining the precise forms of the Santa Fe Style, Morley deliberately overlooked buildings at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque inspired by Pueblo design. See Simmons, Albuquerque, 314 –17; and V. B. Price, A City at the End of the World (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1992), 65 –67. 56. Quoted in Sheppard, Creator of the Santa Fe Style, 94. 57. Eugene A. Fiske, “Spain, the Mother Country of the Castilian Race in America,” Centennial Celebration, Santa Fe, New Mexico (Santa Fe: n.p., 1876), 51, HEH. 58. L. Bradford Prince, Historical Sketches of New Mexico (New York: Leggat Brothers, 1883); Charles Lummis, The Spanish Pioneers (Chicago: A. C. McClurg, 1893); and Benjamin Read, Historia ilustrada de Nuevo México (Santa Fe: Compañía Impresora del Nuevo Mexicano, 1911). Read, whose father died three years after his birth, was raised by his Spanish-speaking mother, the former Ignacia Cano. See Doris Meyer, Speaking for Themselves: Neomexicano Cultural Identity and the Spanish-Language Press (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996), 191–205. Professional study of colonial New Mexico coincided with the founding of the New Mexico Historical Review in 1926 under Lansing Bartlett Bloom. In 1929 Bloom and fellow historians at the University of New Mexico founded the Quivira Society, an organization promoting the publication in English of Spanish colonial documents. The developments in New Mexico were aided by the pioneering study of Spanish borderlands by Herbert Eugene Bolton at the University of California. See John Francis Bannon, Herbert Eugene Bolton: The Historian and the Man, 1870– 1953 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1978); and David J. Weber, “Turner, the Boltonians, and the Borderlands,” in Myth and History of the Hispanic Southwest, ed. David J. Weber (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1988), 33 – 44. 59. A. Gabriel Meléndez, So All Is Not Lost: The Poetics of Print in Nuevomexicano Communities, 1834 – 1958 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1997), 103 –23. Meyer, Speaking for Themselves, 183 –91. 60. Speech at opening of Carnegie Library in Las Vegas, February 13, 1905, and “The Missionary Fathers,” an address delivered before the Coronado Commemorative Convention, October 9, 1907, Larrazolo Papers, folder 11. 61. Beatrice Chauvenet, Hewett and Friends: A Biography of Santa Fe’s Vibrant Era (Santa Fe: Museum of New Mexico Press, 1983), 40 –84. On the scientific-institutional context in which Hewett worked, see George W. Stocking, Jr., “The Santa Fe Style in American Anthropology: Regional Interest, Academic Initiative, and Philanthropic Policy in the First Two Decades of the Laboratory of Anthropology, Inc.,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 18 (January 1982): 3 –19.

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62. Edgar Hewett, untitled lecture, February 13, 1907, Shishkin Collection, Box 4, folder 37. House Bill 100, 1909 Acts of the Legislative Assembly of the Territory of New Mexico, 38th sess. (Santa Fe, 1909). 63. SFNM, June 28, 1877, Shishkin Collection, Box 1, folder 6. Wilson, The Myth of Santa Fe, 125. 64. SFNM, February 8, 1909. 65. Paul A. F. Walter, “Report of the Museum of New Mexico—Palace of the Governors Restored,” El Palacio 2 (December 1914): 1. Wilson, The Myth of Santa Fe, 125 –27; and “The Spanish Pueblo Revival,” 27. 66. Administrative Reports of the School of American Archaeology, Report of the Director, 1913, part 136, Shishkin Collection, Box 3. Walter, “Palace of the Governors Restored,” 1–2; and “Palace of the Governors Links Historic Past with Living Present,” El Palacio 1 (December 1913): 1. 67. Hewett was always a lightning rod of criticism. His most powerful opponent was the wealthy migrant Bronson Cutting. Along with the chamber of commerce, Cutting called on the Archaeological Institute of America to oust Hewett from his position. Noting that Hewett’s work was ridiculed by professional scientists, including Alfred Tozzer at Harvard and Franz Boas at Columbia, Cutting and the chamber asserted that Hewett’s reputation staunched the promised influx into Santa Fe of scientists and students. The complicated affair is recounted in multiple letters in the Shishkin Collection (Box 5, folder 46); the Edgar L. Hewett Papers (Box 24, folder 4 –6, MNM); and the Cutting Papers (Box 13). See also Chauvenet, Hewett and Friends, 109 –20. 68. Certificate of Incorporation, “The Society for the Preservation of Spanish Antiquities in New Mexico,” Bruce T. Ellis Papers, Box 390, folder 7, MNM. Hewett to Ralph Emerson Twitchell, February 18, 1912, and to John McFie, March 19, 1913, Hewett Papers, Box 24, folder 1. Prince wrote his most famous work, Spanish Mission Churches of New Mexico (1915; Chicago: Rio Grande Press, 1977), largely to raise support for the society’s preservation work. 69. Burton Benedict, The Anthropology of World’s Fairs: San Francisco’s Panama Pacific International Exposition of 1915 (London and Berkeley: Lowie Museum of Anthropology and Scolar Press, 1983), 33 – 44, 45 – 49. On the planning and strategy behind the exposition, see Kropp, “‘All Our Yesterdays,’” 182 –233. 70. Rydell, All the World’s a Fair, 209 –23. Phoebe S. Kropp, “‘There is a little sermon in that’: Constructing the Native Southwest at the San Diego Panama-California Exposition of 1915,” in The Great Southwest of the Fred Harvey Company and the Santa Fe Railway, ed. Marta Weigle and Barbara A. Babcock (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1996), 36 –37. Edgar Hewett, “The Southwest: Yesterday and Tomorrow,” address presented at the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Southwestern Division, December 2, 1920, printed in El Palacio 10 (February 19, 1921): 10 –11. 71. “California’s Expositions Attract Great Throngs,” undated article from Los Angeles Times, Ralph E. Twitchell Papers, S-26 (d), MNM. Rydell, All the World’s a Fair, 209 –31. Kropp, “Constructing,” 36, 43.

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72. Southern California Panama-California Exposition Commission, Southern California (n.p., 1914), 10 –11. 73. Edgar L. Hewett and William Templeton Johnson, “Architecture of the Exposition,” Papers of the School of American Archaeology 32 (1916): 34 –35. “Some Aspects of the Architecture of the Panama-California Exposition,” Hewett Papers, Box 58. Thomas, “Harvesting Ramona’s Garden,” 131. Kropp, “Constructing,” 42, and “‘All Our Yesterdays,’” 246 –57. 74. Report of Ralph Emerson Twitchell, President of the Board of Exposition Managers, to Gov. William C. McDonald, October 1, 1913, Prince Papers, World’s Panama Exposition file. Michael Miller, “New Mexico’s Role in the Panama-California Exposition of 1915,” El Palacio 91 (Fall 1985): 13 –17. 75. Miller, “New Mexico’s Role,” 14 –15. The building was admired by such dignitaries as Theodore Roosevelt, Charles Lummis, and U.S. Vice President Thomas Marshall. It was visited, on average, by 800 to 1,000 a day; no state building attracted larger crowds. Attendance figures and general impressions are found in the Twitchell Papers, Box 182. 76. Reports of March 21 and May 27, 1915, Twitchell Papers, Box 182. Anonymous, “Our Exhibit at San Diego Is the Whole Show,” Hewett Papers, S-24, vol. 8, no. 1. Waldo Twitchell to Paul Walter, Walter Papers, undated correspondence file. “Indians Purloin Sacred Film,” unidentified newspaper excerpt, July 25, 1915, Walter Papers, Box 124. 77. R. E. Twitchell to Gov. William McDonald, December 15, 1915, McDonald Papers, Box 6, NMSRCA. Anonymous, “New Mexico at San Diego; We Have the Call,” Hewett Papers, S-24, #8, vol. 1. The lament about New Mexico’s reputation was expressed by Waldo Twitchell in his report of May 26, 1915, Twitchell Papers, Box 182. 78. Concerns about political corruption are recorded, for example, in “Leed y Reflejad,” 1898, Epifanio Vigil Papers, Box 1, folder 31, NMSRCA; and Frank Clancy to E. L. Bartlett, October 20, 1903, Bartlett Papers, Box 1, folder 5. On violence, see Tobias Durán, “Francisco Chávez, Thomas B. Catron, and Organized Political Violence in Santa Fe in the 1890s,” NMHR 59 (July 1984): 291–310. 79. “Unreasoning Prejudice,” SFNM, December 8, 1909. W. F. Wilcox, “Advertising New Mexico,” Santa Fe Eagle, February 13, 1909, Harry Dorman Scrapbook, MNM. Gilson Willete, “The Most Un-American Part of the U.S.,” New York Times Magazine, August 20, 1905, 3. New Mexico’s first jury trial without an interpreter was held in 1915. Nancie Gonzales, The SpanishAmericans of New Mexico: A Heritage of Pride (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1969), 18. 80. “Wiping Out the Stain” and “Clean Up!” SFNM, May 5, 1911. “New Mexico’s Need,” SFNM, July 6, 1912. “Museum and School Share in San Diego’s Triumph,” El Palacio 2 (November 1914): 2. 81. Speech by Fall to the U.S. Senate, April 21, 1914, Hobart Durham Papers, folder 22, NMSRCA. Fall quoted the words of George Look, a property owner in El Paso. Frank N. Page to Fall, July 31, 1913, Box 31, and E. V. Chávez to Fall, August 18, 1913, Box 75, Fall Papers. Amado Chaves to Gov. William McDonald, April 14, 1914, McDonald Papers, “Mexican Situation” file.

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82. Page to Fall, May 8, 1913, Fall Papers, Box 31. Quoted in Rydell, All the World’s a Fair, 224. 83. Fall to Bursum, May 1, 1916, Fall Papers, Box 15, folder 19. “Enough,” SFNM, March 10, 1916. 84. Undated memo, ca. June 1918, Fall Papers, Box 37, file 18. Llewelyn to Gov. Washington Lindsey, April 6, 1917, Lindsey Papers, NMSRCA. 85. Quoted in Henry Wray, “America’s Unguarded Gateway,” North American Review 208 (August 1918): 312 –14; and Albert B. Fall, “A Proud and Loyal State,” North American Review 208 (September 1918): 487–93. 86. Report of the Secretary and Acting Director of the Museum of New Mexico and the School of American Archaeology, September 1, 1915, to August 31, 1916, McDonald Papers. “Appropriation for the State Museum,” n.d., Frank Springer Papers, Box 253, MNM. Wilson, The Myth of Santa Fe, 130 –35. 87. Carlos Vierra, “New Mexico Architecture,” Art and Archaeology 7 (January–February 1918): 40. 88. Anonymous, “A New Museum of Art Which Is One Hundred Percent American,” Current Opinion 65 (August 1918): 120 –21. See also Crawford, “Discovering a Real American Art.” 89. “State History Is Revived in Society Meeting,” undated item in Twitchell Papers, scrapbook #26 (d), MNM. Antonio Lucero, “Homely Virtues of the Spanish-Americans,” Old Santa Fe 1 (April 1914): 443. 90. “Address by Dr. Edgar L. Hewett” and “Address of Hon. Frank Springer,” El Palacio 4 (November 1917), 1–18, 71–75. “New Museum the Noblest, Simplest and Most Impressive Type of Christian Architecture Originating on This Continent,” SFNM, November 26, 1917. 91. Antonio Lucero, “Fearless, Faithful Franciscan Friars Brought Civilization and Christianity to New Mexico,” SFNM, November 26, 1917. “Lucero Would Have Room in Museum for Famed Spanish-Americans” and “Mr. Lucero’s Letter,” SFNM, September 7, 1917.

Chapter 4. Discovering “Spanish Culture” at the Santa Fe Fiesta, 1919 –1936 1. Historical Society of New Mexico, No. 23, “Address Delivered at the Ceremonies Incident to the Dedication of the Cross of the Martyrs,” by Hon. L. Bradford Prince and Rev. Daniel T. Lawton, S. J., September 15, 1920, 9, MNM. 2. In the early 1920s, for example, the Anglo-oriented Santa Fe Trail Days pageant shared the spotlight with Indian ceremonial dances and commemoration of the Spanish reconquest. The odd sight of Pueblo Indians commemorating their ancestors’ defeat appeared to trouble few participants. That is not the case today. The contemporary reaction is captured in Gathering Up Again: Fiesta in Santa Fe, a documentary film produced by Jeannette DeBouzck and

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Diane Reyner (Santa Fe: Quotidian Film Productions, 1992). See also Chris Wilson, The Myth of Santa Fe: Creating a Modern Regional Tradition (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1997), 207. 3. See, for example, Ronald L. Grimes, Symbol and Conquest: Public Ritual and Drama in Santa Fe, New Mexico (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1976; Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1992); Wilson, The Myth of Santa Fe, 181–231; Thomas E. Chávez, “Santa Fe’s Own: A History of Fiesta,” El Palacio 91 (Spring 1985): 7–17; Andrea Claire Gillespie, “Sign and Signifier in Santa Fe: The History of a Clothing Style” (Ph.D. diss., University of New Mexico, 1995), 18 –21; and Bruce David Bernstein, “The Marketing of Culture: Pottery and Santa Fe’s Indian Market” (Ph.D. diss., University of New Mexico, 1993), 46 –59. 4. “Modernism” can be frustratingly vague. I use it to refer to the tendency in modern society to come to terms with and even celebrate social and psychological influences once deemed unacceptably base. See Daniel Singal, “Towards a Definition of American Modernism,” AQ 39 (Spring 1987): 7–26. 5. Grimes, Symbol and Conquest, 198. 6. Ramón A. Gutiérrez, When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away: Marriage, Sexuality, and Power in New Mexico, 1500– 1846 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1991), 144 – 45. 7. “The Original Bando of the Marquez de la Peñuela,” trans. Lansing Bloom, in The Fiesta Book, Papers of the School of American Research, no. 13 (Santa Fe: School of American Research, 1926), 2 –6. Fray Angelico Chavez, “The First Santa Fe Fiesta Council, 1712,” NMHR 28 (July 1953): 183 –91. Chávez, “Santa Fe’s Own,” 9. 8. Fray Angelico Chavez, Our Lady of the Conquest (Santa Fe: Historical Society of New Mexico, 1948), 33 – 49. Originally a statue of Our Lady of the Assumption, La Conquistadora was recently designated Our Lady of Peace. Wilson, The Myth of Santa Fe, 184. 9. “Fiestas in New Mexico” and “Spanish Fiestas in New Mexico,” El Palacio 48 (November 1941): 239 – 45, and 51 (June 1944): 101–6, respectively. Marta Weigle and Peter White, The Lore of New Mexico (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1988), 390 –91, 397– 405. 10. Interview with Andrés Mora, February 2, 1989, East Mountain Oral History Project, folder 13, CSWR. Interview with Eddie Chávez, September 23, 1988, North Valley Oral History Project, folder 19, CSWR. 11. Grimes, Symbol and Conquest, 68. 12. Unidentified account of Corpus Christi procession, Hewett Collection, S-26, #8, vol. 1. Photograph of participants in Corpus Christi procession, Morada photographs, G39/67, Kit Carson Memorial Foundation, Taos, New Mex. 13. “De Vargas’s Coming,” undated newspaper clipping, Amado Chaves Collection, Box 2, folder 39. 14. “De Vargas Pageant Wonderful Sight of Days of Chivalry,” SFNM, July 6, 1912. Wilson, The Myth of Santa Fe, 192 –200, 206. Chávez, “Santa Fe’s Own,” 11. 15. “The De Vargas Pageant,” SFNM, July 6, 1911. “Event to Attract Crowds

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from Far and Near,” SFNM, June 25, 1912. “De Vargas Pageant,” SFNM, July 6, 1912. J. S. McGroarty, The Mission Play and Souvenir Book (Los Angeles: Challpin Holding Co., 1930), HEH. Carey McWilliams, Southern California Country: An Island on the Land (New York: Duell, Sloan & Pearce, 1949), 78. See also William Deverell, “Privileging the Mission over the Mexican: The Rise of Regional Identity in Southern California,” in Many Wests: Place, Culture, and Regional Identity, ed. David M. Wrobel and Michael C. Steiner (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1997), 246 –53. 16. David Glassberg, American Historical Pageantry: The Uses of Tradition in the Early Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), 48 –67, 284. 17. Chávez, “Santa Fe’s Own,” 11. 18. “George Washington Armijo,” in Hispanic Heroes: Portraits of New Mexicans Who Have Made a Difference, ed. Rose Díaz and Jan Dodson Barnhart (Albuquerque: Starlight Publishing, n.d.), 9. “Funeral Mass Wednesday for George W. Armijo, Politician and Orator,” SFNM, February 17, 1947. 19. New Mexico State Business Directory (Denver, Colo.: Gazetter, 1915), 615 – 33. Anglo businessmen did not always speak with a single voice, of course. One of the great contretemps of the 1910s, also involving the issue of promotion, pitted Edgar Hewett and his museum allies against the Santa Fe Chamber of Commerce. See chap. 3, n. 67. 20. Profile of Roman L. Baca, Prince Papers, Box 2, folder 6. Territory of New Mexico, New Mexico Legislative Manual, 1911 (Santa Fe, 1911), 119. Beatrice Chauvenet, Hewett and Friends: A Biography of Santa Fe’s Vibrant Era (Santa Fe: Museum of New Mexico Press, 1983), 150 –51. 21. “The Santa Fe Fiesta,” El Palacio 8 (September 30, 1919): 99 –106, 128 – 30. Hewett had laid plans for expanding the De Vargas Pageant as early as 1913, but the San Diego exposition and the war got in the way. Hewett to James Seligman, April 14, 1913, Hewett Papers, Box 24, folder 2. 22. “Old Spanish Splendor Marks Return of the Cross and the Sword,” SFNM, September 14, 1920. “Santa Fe Fiesta and Indian Fair,” El Palacio 15 (September 13, 1923): 100. John De Huff, “How Shall We Educate the Indian?” El Palacio 13 (September 1, 1922): 59 –64. 23. La Farge quoted in Marta Weigle and Kyle Fiore, Santa Fe and Taos: The Writer’s Era, 1916 – 1941 (Santa Fe: Ancient City Press, 1982), 19. On the Bursum Bill and Burke’s action, see Lawrence C. Kelly, The Assault on Assimilation: John Collier and the Origins of Indian Policy Reform (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1983), 163 –306. The exemption was granted on the grounds that Fiesta performances educated and entertained non-Indians. See Wilson, The Myth of Santa Fe, 206. 24. Untitled statement by Hewett in El Palacio 14 (February 15, 1923): 52. Montoya to Bloom, July 18, 1923, and Bloom to Montoya, August 2, 1923, Santa Fe Fiesta Collection, Box 384, MNM. 25. “The Santa Fe Fiesta and Centenary of Santa Fe Trail,” El Palacio 13 (July 15, 1922): 16. Dorothy McAlister, “The Santa Fe Fiesta,” Albuquerque

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Evening Herald, printed in El Palacio 11 (September 15, 1921): 78 –81. In 1922 a more permanent and secluded stage set was built in the patio of the Palace of the Governors. 26. “It would seem,” architect William Templeton Johnson wrote in 1916, “that Santa Fe can make the greatest progress as a tourist resort and as a pleasant place of residence for cultivated and intellectual people.” Johnson, “The Santa Fe of the Future,” Papers of the School of American Archaeology, 1916, no. 31 (Santa Fe: School of American Archaeology, 1916), 11, HEH. 27. On Luhan, see Lois Palken Rudnick, Mabel Dodge Luhan: New Woman, New Worlds (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1984). On motives of Anglo observers, see Leah Dilworth, Imagining Indians in the Southwest: Persistent Visions of a Primitive Past (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1996), 1–9; and Barbara Babcock, “‘A New Mexico Rebecca’: Imaging Pueblo Women,” JSW 32 (Winter 1990): 400 – 437. 28. La Fonda, constructed in 1920, was acquired by the Santa Fe Railway in 1926 and remodeled with Spanish colonial decor under the expert eye of Harvey Company designer Mary Colter. As one scholar has pointed out, the hotel’s Hispano furnishings only created “atmospheric background” for the ongoing trade in Indian objects. Marta Weigle, “Exposition and Mediation: Mary Colter, Erna Fergusson, and the Santa Fe/Harvey Popularization of the Native Southwest, 1902 –1940,” Frontiers 12, no. 3 (1992): 128. See also Virginia L. Grattan, Mary Colter: Builder upon the Red Earth (Flagstaff, Ariz.: Northland Press, 1980), 50 –52; and Peter Hertzog, La Fonda: The Inn of Santa Fe (Portales, New Mex.: Press of the Territorian, 1962). 29. James MacMillan, Temporary Secretary, Santa Fe Pageant Committee, to Museum of New Mexico, May 8, 1919, Santa Fe Fiesta Collection, Box 384, folder 7. 30. Untitled article on Los Angeles Fiesta, April 11, 1894, Max Meyberg Scrapbook of La Fiesta de Los Angeles, n.p., Seaver Center, Los Angeles, Calif. Ratcliffe Hicks, Southern California, or Land of the Afternoon (Springfield, Mass.: Springfield Printing and Binding Co., 1898), 36, HEH. See also Marco R. Newmark, “La Fiesta de Los Angeles,” Southern California Historical Quarterly 29 (March 1947): 101–11. 31. “The Santa Fe Fiesta,” 100. 32. “Old Spanish Splendor Marks,” SFNM, September 14, 1920. Wilson, The Myth of Santa Fe, 226. 33. Commemorative proclamation, Santa Fe, September 11, 1919, Larrazolo Papers, Box 1, folder 18. Richard Nostrand, The Hispano Homeland (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992), 68. 34. Nina Otero-Warren, untitled talk delivered at Clayton, New Mex., Bergere Family Papers, Box 3, folder 40. Sena quoted in Chauvenet, Hewett and Friends, 153. For a different perspective on Indian-Hispano relations, see Frances Leon Quintana, “Land, Water, and Pueblo-Hispanic Relations in Northern New Mexico,” JSW 32 (Autumn 1990): 288 –99. 35. Edgar L. Street, President of the Santa Fe Chamber of Commerce, to

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Hewett, June 6, 1924, Historical Society of New Mexico Collection, Box 573, folder 21, MNM. “1,400 See Fiesta of Santa Fe,” SFNM, September 5, 1922. W. C. Bradford was named music director, and Gertrude Espinosa, an instructor at the University of Oregon, took charge of Spanish folk dancing. The newest attraction, hired to complement Tsianina, was the Canadian Mohawk singer Oskenonton. See Paul A. F. Walter, “The Santa Fe Fiesta of September, 1924,” Art and Archaeology 18 (November–December 1924): 181–83. Between 1924 and 1926, the festival failed to turn a profit. “Fiesta of 1924,” Santa Fe Fiesta Collection, Box 384, folder 10. Itemized budgets for 1925 and 1926, Hewett Papers, Box 54, folder 4. 36. Arrell Morgan Gibson, The Santa Fe and Taos Colonies: Age of the Muses, 1900– 1942 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1983), 24 –38. Wilson, The Myth of Santa Fe, 141, 353 n. 60. Weigle and Fiore, Santa Fe and Taos, 215. The Taos art colony was started just after 1900, when eight painters settled in Taos and formed the organization Ocho Pintores. In 1912, to better publicize and market their work, they organized the Taos Society of Artists. 37. Chauvenet, Hewett and Friends, 141– 46. 38. Witter Bynner, “A City of Change,” Laughing Horse (September 1924): n.p. Weigle and Fiore, Santa Fe and Taos, 23. 39. John Loughery, John Sloan: Painter and Rebel (New York: Henry Holt, 1995), 74, 144 – 47, 164, 193 –95. 40. E. Dana Johnson, “The True Fiesta,” SFNM, reprinted in El Palacio 17 (July 29, 1924), 4. 41. Alice Corbin Henderson, “E. Dana Johnson,” NMHR 13 (January 1938): 120 –28. Retirement announcement, E. Dana Johnson, New Mexico Sentinel, July 6, 1937. Justine Ward to Bronson Cutting, November 2, 1918, Cutting Papers, Box 17. 42. Richard Lowitt, Bronson M. Cutting: Progressive Politician (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1992), 320 and passim. Although Lowitt concludes that Cutting was not gay, those who knew the senator, including Beatrice Chauvenet, say otherwise. Personal interview with Chauvenet, Albuquerque, January 13, 1993. 43. “Program for Natives,” in speech of September 12, 1928, Cutting Papers, Box 82. Chauvenet, Hewett and Friends, 177. 44. Lydia J. Trowbridge, “Santa Fe Fiesta of 1926,” El Palacio 21 (October 15, 1926): 197. “The 1925 Santa Fe Fiesta,” El Palacio 18 (March 2, 1925): 87–88. Wilson, The Myth of Santa Fe, 206. 45. “The Fiesta,” SFNM, August 9, 1926. Austin to Cassidy, August 26, 1926, Austin Collection, CSWR. University of New Mexico professor T. M. Pearce confirmed Austin’s meaning, recalling how Hewett disliked the Pasatiempo and wanted the Fiesta to remain “solemn and sacred.” Ibid., marginal notes dated January 4, 1963. George Law, “A Victory for Romance,” Touring Topics 19 (March 1927): 29. SFNM, September 3 and September 7, 1926, quoted in Oliver La Farge, Santa Fe: The Autobiography of a Southwestern Town (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1959), 297–302.

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46. Gibson, The Santa Fe and Taos Colonies, 255 –57. The federation, headquartered in Texas, drew its members from southern and midwestern states. 47. “Keeping Santa Fe Different Is to Make Influence National,”SFNM, January 23, 1921, in Prince Papers, folder 3. Untitled editorial in SFNM, excerpted in Albuquerque Journal, October 4, 1925, Scrapbook 66, Erna Fergusson Papers, CSWR. 48. Chauvenet, Hewett and Friends, 177. Quoted in Gibson, The Taos and Santa Fe Colonies, 256. Hewett to Walter, April 29 and April 30, 1926, Walter Papers, Box 124. Ruth Laughlin Barker, “A Plea for Hospitality,” SFNM, April 26, 1926. 49. Mary Austin, “The Town That Doesn’t Want a Chautauqua,” New Republic 47 (July 7, 1926), 195 –97. Mary Austin, “The Term Chautauqua,” letter to the SFNM, n.d., Walter Papers, Box 124. “The Last Stand against George Babbitt,” Bookman 63 (August 1926): 626 –27. “Old Santa Fe Fans in Fear of Main St. Menace,” press release, E. D. Johnson Collection, Box 418, file 9, MNM. See also “Bigger and Better,” Time 8 (July 12, 1926): 16. 50. Franz Boas, The Mind of Primitive Man (New York: Macmillan, 1911). Margaret Mead, Coming of Age in Samoa: A Psychological Study of Primitive Youth for Western Civilization (New York: William Morrow, 1928); Robert Redfield, Tepoztlán, a Mexican Village: A Study of Folklife (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1930); and Ruth Benedict, Patterns of Culture (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1934). On changing uses of “culture” among anthropologists, see George W. Stocking, Jr., “The Ethnographic Sensibility of the 1920s and the Dualism of the Anthropological Tradition,” in Romantic Motives: Essays on Anthropological Sensibility, ed. George W. Stocking, Jr. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 208 –76. A sophisticated study of the many uses of “culture” early in the century is Susan Hegeman, Patterns for America: Modernism and the Concept of Culture (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999). 51. Not limited to twentieth-century America, the problem had nonetheless been aggravated by recent decades of industrialization, as well as the world war. Edward Sapir, “Culture, Genuine and Spurious,” American Journal of Sociology 29 (January 1924): 401–29, esp. 410 –12. It was also true, of course, that the industrial order had engendered its own critics. By creating new markets for art and literature, as well as the wealth and leisure to reflect on American civilization, industrialization made possible careers like those of Edward Sapir and Mary Austin. 52. Admiration of a “folk” was not new to early-twentieth-century America. Peter Burke traces a European reaction to the socioindustrial change at the end of the eighteenth century. See his Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (London: Temple, Smith, 1978). On fascination with the people of Appalachia, see David Whisnant, All That Is Native and Fine: The Politics of Culture in an American Region (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983); and Allen W. Batteau, The Invention of Appalachia (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1990). 53. Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant, “The Journal of a Mud House,” pt. 4, Harper’s Magazine 145 (June 1922): 61.

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54. “Open Letter to the Federated Club Women of Texas,” n.d., Beatrice Chauvenet Collection, Box 606, folder 35, MNM. Old Santa Fe Association to “Dear Madam,” May 13, 1926, Old Santa Fe Association Records, Box 465, folder 9, MNM. “Culture in the Southwest,” New York Times, July 13, 1926, 20. A. Gabriel Meléndez, So All Is Not Lost: The Poetics of Print in Nuevomexicano Communities, 1834 – 1958 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1997), 197–98. 55. Amelia E. White to A. V. Kidder, May 18, 1926, Amelia Elizabeth White Papers, Box 3b, 1926 Correspondence, School of American Research, Santa Fe. 56. Open letter from the Santa Fe Fiesta Corporation, July 15, 1927, Santa Fe Fiesta Collection, Box 384, Folder 14. “Pageant at Bowl Thrills an Enthusiastic Audience,” SFNM, September 6, 1927. 57. “Fiesta Back-to-Native Movement Has Finally Won,” SFNM, September 3, 1929. “Doing Our Own Stuff,” SFNM, September 6, 1932. “The Fiesta. Event Staged with All-Spanish Participation and in Spanish Language,” El Palacio 29 (September 29, 1930): 141– 42. John D. DeHuff, “History of the Santa Fe Fiesta,” New Mexico Highway Journal 7 (August 1929): 18 –19. “Spirit of Play Holds Whole Town,” SFNM, September 2, 1930. 58. “El Pasatiempo,” SFNM, September 2, 1936. “Fiesta Back-to-Native Movement,” SFNM, September 3, 1929. “El Pasatiempo,” Fiesta Supplement to the SFNM, September 5, 1931, E. Boyd Collection, Box 13, file 241, NMSRCA. 59. “Now the Fiesta,” SFNM, August 31, 1929. “The Spirit of the Fiesta,” Las Vegas Daily Optic, quoted in SFNM, September 3, 1935. “Santa Fe’s Colorful Fiesta, September 11th, 12th and 13th, Commemorates 245th Anniversary of De Vargas Conquest,” New Mexico Sentinel, August 31, 1937. “Doing Our Own Stuff,” SFNM, September 6, 1932. “From the Spanish,” SFNM, August 8, 1925. Recorded interview with Anita G. Thomas, November 28, 1984, Vivan Las Fiestas Collection, Museum of International Folk Art, Santa Fe. 60. New Mexico State Business Directory, 1926 (365 –76) and 1931 (455 –76). 61. “Fiesta Back-to-Native Movement,” SFNM, September 3, 1929. “Now the Fiesta,” SFNM, August 31, 1929. Ashley Pond, in “Sidelights on the Fiesta,” SFNM, August 24, 1927. In 1931 Anglos held seventeen of nineteen council seats. Benigno Muñiz and Nina Otero-Warren were the two Hispano representatives. Santa Fe Fiesta Collection, Box 20, folder d. 62. “From the Spanish,” SFNM, August 8, 1925. “Criticise, Please,” SFNM, September 2, 1930. Minutes of Board of Directors, Santa Fe Fiesta Corporation, September 2, 1931, Santa Fe Fiesta Collection, Box 20, folder d. 63. “El Pasatiempo: Suplemento de SFNM,” August 31, 1930, Bergere Family Papers, folder 110. “Old Spanish [Festival],” SFNM, September 5, 1933. Wilson, The Myth of Santa Fe, 213. “Mrs. Warren Winner of First Prize in Hysteria Parade” and “Villistas Stage a Marvelous Fiesta Spectacle Saturday,” SFNM, September 4, 1928. Recorded interview with Thomas, November 28, 1984, Vivan Las Fiestas Collection. 64. “The Hysterical Pageant,” SFNM, September 6, 1928. “226th Annual Fiesta Is Greatest and Most Successful Yet Held,” SFNM, September 6, 1938.

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65. Memo of Wm. W. Nielsen, President of Santa Fe Fiesta Corporation, April 27, 1931, Santa Fe Fiesta Collection, Box 20, folder d. 66. “The Princesses—Bevy of Beauties,” El Pasatiempo supplement to SFNM, September 2, 1936. “La Reina de la Fiesta,” photo caption in SFNM, August 29, 1938. 67. On the Sena family, see “Amalia Sanchez and Sena Plaza,” Chauvenet Collection, Box 605, folder 17; and “Hearing Set on Retiring Jose Sena, 83,” SFNM, June 27, 1950. On the Oteros, see Charlotte Whaley, Nina Otero-Warren of Santa Fe (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1994), 7–51. 68. See, for example, Stanley H. Brandes, Power and Persuasion: Fiestas and Social Control in Rural Mexico (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988); and Susan G. Davis, Parades and Power: Street Theatre in NineteenthCentury Philadelphia (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986). In the New Mexico context, see Grimes, Symbol and Conquest; Sylvia Rodríguez, “Fiesta Time and Plaza Space: Resistance and Accommodation in a Tourist Town,” Journal of American Folklore 11 (Winter 1998): 39 –56; and Sylvia Rodríguez, “The Taos Fiesta: Invented Tradition and the Infrapolitics of Symbolic Reclamation,” JSW 30 (Spring 1997): 33 –57. 69. Davis, Parades and Power, esp. 1–22, 155 –73.

Chapter 5. The Revival of Spanish Colonial Arts, 1924 –1936 1. Benjamin M. Read, “Mrs. Adelina Otero Warren,” A. M. Bergere Family Papers, file 118, NMSRCA. Nina Otero[-Warren], Old Spain in Our Southwest (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1936), 9. On the author’s life, see Charlotte Whaley, Nina Otero-Warren of Santa Fe (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1994). 2. “Nina Otero Paints Authentic Picture of Spanish New Mexico,” SFNM, February 2, 1936; John E. Englekirk, Spanish Review 3 (November 1936); Eda Lou Walton, New York Herald Tribune, April 26, 1936; and Paul A. F. Walter, El Palacio 40 (May–June 1936): 188 –19. Campa’s untitled review appeared in New Mexico Quarterly 6 (May 1936): 149 –51. 3. Roland Dickey, New Mexico Village Arts (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1949), 241. 4. Frank Bond, untitled address to the Ten Dons Club of Albuquerque, printed as “Memoirs of Forty Years in New Mexico,” NMHR 21 (October 1946): 342. On the seasonal migrations of Hispanos, see Sarah Deutsch, No Separate Refuge: Culture, Class, and Gender on an Anglo-Hispanic Frontier in the American Southwest, 1880– 1940 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 13 – 40. 5. U.S. Dept. of Agriculture, Soil Conservation Service, “Population of the Upper Rio Grande Watershed,” Regional Bulletin No. 43, Conservation Economics Series, No. 16, July 1937, 6, Laboratory of Anthropology, Santa Fe. The figure is based on data from school censuses. In areas farthest from Santa Fe and

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Las Vegas, the only two towns in the Rio Arriba with more than 1,000 residents, the Hispano population was much higher. In Taos and Mora counties, for example, it ranged between 93 and 96 percent. See also Reginald Fisher, “Hispanic People of the Rio Grande,” El Palacio 49 (August 1942): 158. 6. “The Koshare Tours,” ca. 1922, 5, Twentieth-Century Travel Literature Pamphlets, Box 1, folder 4A, CSWR. The Koshare Tours, established in 1921 by Ethel Hickey and Erna Fergusson, were superseded by the Harvey Company and renamed Indian Detours. Between 1926 and 1951, the company served as many as one million tourists. Unidentified newspaper clipping, ca. 1951, R. Hunter Clarkson Papers, NMSRCA. For background on the touring operations, see Marta Weigle, “Exposition and Mediation: Mary Colter, Erna Fergusson, and the Santa Fe/Harvey Popularization of the Native Southwest, 1902 –1940,” Frontiers 12, no. 3 (1992): 129 –37; and D. H. Thomas, The Southwestern Indian Detours (Phoenix, Ariz.: Hunter Publishing, 1978). 7. Untitled editorial, Albuquerque Journal, August 21, 1925, in Erna Fergusson Papers, S-66, CSWR. Quoted in Suzanne Forrest, Preservation of the Village: New Mexico’s Hispanics and the New Deal (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1989), 106. 8. Ladd Haystead, “Why Tourists?” New Mexico Highway Journal 8 (April 1930): 7–9, 26. The magazine’s history is recounted in Arnold Vigil, “Weathering the Times: 70 Years and Stronger than Ever,” New Mexico 70 (July 1992): 17. 9. Ely Leyba, “The Church of the Twelve Apostles: A Spanish-American Writer Gives an Intimate Account of the Three and One-Half Centuries’ Service Rendered by This Holy Edifice,” 11 (June 1933): 19 –21, 47– 49. See also Reginaldo Espinosa, “Canute: A Game Handed Down from the Indians to Spanish Settlers Still Lives in Native Homes,” 11 (May 1933): 49 –50; and Herminia B. Chacón, “The Christ Child Comes to New Mexico: A SpanishAmerican Writer Tells of the Christmas Customs of the Descendants of the Conquistadores,” 10 (December 1932): 7–9, 45. 10. See, for example, H. T. Wilson, Historical Sketch of Santa Fe, New Mexico (Chicago: Hotel World Publishing Co., 1880), 46 – 48, 69 –71; Sylvester Baxter, “Along the Rio Grande,” and Birge Harrison, “Española and Its Environs,” in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 70 (April 1885): 687–700 and (May 1885): 825 –35, respectively; Ernest Peixotto, Our Hispanic Southwest (New York: Scribners, 1916); and Charles Francis Saunders, Finding the Worthwhile in the Southwest (New York: R. M. McBride, 1918). One local exception to the pattern is Paul A. F. Walter, “A New Mexico Lourdes,” El Palacio 3 (January 1916): 3 –27. 11. Prudence Woollett, “Mission of Indian Detour Courier,” Saturday Night (May 31, 1930), n.p., Clarkson Papers, NMSRCA. Withers Woolford, “The Road Back,” New Mexico 9 (July 1931): 8. Alice Corbin [Henderson], “Old Spain in New Mexico,” in They Know New Mexico: Intimate Sketches by Western Writers, issued by the Passenger Department, Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway (Chicago: Rand McNally and Co., 1928), 11 (filed in Elizabeth Willis DeHuff Papers, Scrapbook 1, CSWR). 12. See, for example, Bertram Broome, “Juan Borrego Meets Depression,”

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New Mexico 10 (October 1932): 20 –21, 39 – 41; and Gene Calkins, “Recompense: A Story Revealing the Contentment and Security Which the Spanish Speaking People of Rural New Mexico Find in Their Mode of Life,” New Mexico 12 (March 1934): 16 –18. 13. Richard Nostrand, The Hispano Homeland (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992), 70 –92. 14. “Report and Recommendations,” Interdepartmental Rio Grande Committee, October 1937, Florence H. Ellis Papers, folder 1, CSWR. Alvar Ward Carlson, The Spanish-American Homeland: Four Centuries in New Mexico’s Rio Arriba (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 83 –85. On the earnings of seasonal migrants, see Marta Weigle, ed., Hispanic Villages of Northern New Mexico, reprint of vol. 2 of the 1935 Tewa Basin Study (Santa Fe: Lightning Tree, 1975), 35 –36. Reyes Martínez, untitled account of the departure for Colorado, November 28, 1936, WPA file 5-5-2, #24, MNM. 15. The controversial claim is made by Alvar Carlson. He points out that in 1900, 40 percent of reported farms in northern New Mexico totaled less than ten acres. See Carlson, Spanish-American Homeland, 72, 94, 110, 114. John R. Van Ness, “Hispanic Land Grants: Ecology and Subsistence in the Uplands of Northern New Mexico and Southern Colorado,” in Land, Water, and Culture: New Perspectives on Hispanic Land Grants, ed. Charles L. Briggs and John Van Ness (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1987), 200 –202. Nancie Gonzales, The Spanish-Americans of New Mexico: A Heritage of Pride (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1969), 123. Suzanne Forrest, Preservation of the Village: New Mexico’s Hispanics and the New Deal (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1989), 17–21. 16. Carlson, Spanish-American Homeland, 67, 98, 208 –12. Forrest, Preservation of the Village, 25. 17. Account of Leandro Garcia, Dolores Perea, and José Candelaria, July 24, 1990, East Mountain Oral History Project, folder 9, CSWR. 18. Interdepartmental Rio Grande Committee, “Report and Recommendations,” October 1937, 6, in Florence H. Ellis Papers, folder 1, CSWR. Forrest, Preservation of the Village, 11. 19. Untitled Tewa Basin Survey, Truchas, 1935, A. M. Bergere Family Papers, Box 6, folder 112. Allan G. Harper, Andrew Córdova, and Kalvero Oberg, Man and Resources in the Rio Grande Valley (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1943), 110 –12. 20. Report of Taos County Cooperative Health Association, January 15, 1944, in Ellis Papers, folder 2. Carlson, Spanish-American Homeland, 92. Forrest, Preservation of the Village, 11. Thomas Herrera, September 1992, East Mountain Oral History Project, folder 10, CSWR. 21. On the “Hispanic New Deal,” see Forrest, Preservation of the Village, 77– 78. Cyrus McCormick, Jr., “Public Works: Extension of Secondary Highway System in New Mexico,” memorandum of October 14, 1933, and McCormick to Charles Fahy, Dept. of Interior, October 5, 1933, Bronson M. Cutting Papers, Box 10, Library of Congress. 22. Mary Austin, Earth Horizon (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1932), 359.

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23. Ina Sizer Cassidy, “Art and Artists of New Mexico,” New Mexico 12 (June 1934): 28, 49 –51. Alta Applegate to T. M. Pearce, Thomas Matthew Pearce Papers, May 2, 1940, Box 30, folder 15, CSWR. See also Mary Austin, “Frank Applegate,” New Mexico Quarterly 5 (August 1932): 215 –18. 24. Quoted from Applegate’s notes on Spanish folk art, Mowbray-Clarke Family Papers, Archives of American Art, Washington, D.C. “Folk Arts Pure in New Mexico, Frank Applegate Tells Audience,” SFNM, November 26, 1930. 25. See, for example, Charles L. Briggs, The Wood Carvers of Córdova, New Mexico: Social Dimensions of an Artistic “Revival” (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1980), 46 –51; and Deutsch, No Separate Refuge, 190 –91. 26. William Wroth, “The Hispanic Craft Revival in New Mexico,” in Revivals! Diverse Traditions, 1920– 1945, ed. Janet Kardon (New York: American Craft Museum, 1994), 84. On López, see Briggs, Wood Carvers of Córdova, 20 –35; on Ortega and Luna, see Juanita Jaramillo, “Rio Grande Weaving: A Continuing Tradition,” and William Wroth, “Jewelry in Spanish New Mexico: Some Thoughts on the Arts of the Platero,” in Hispanic Crafts of the Southwest, ed. William Wroth (Colorado Springs, Colo.: Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, 1977), 15 and 67, respectively. 27. Wroth, “The Hispanic Craft Revival,” 85 –86. Marc Simmons, “Colonial New Mexico and Mexico: The Historical Relationship,” in Colonial Frontiers: Art and Life in Spanish New Mexico, ed. Christine Mather (Santa Fe: Ancient City Press, 1983), 75 –77. Jaramillo, “Rio Grande Weaving,” 10. For a finely illustrated overview of village arts and their origins, see Donna Pierce and Marta Weigle, eds., Spanish New Mexico, vol. 1: The Arts of Spanish New Mexico (Santa Fe: Museum of New Mexico Press, 1996). 28. William Wroth, “Introduction: Hispanic Southwestern Craft Traditions in the Twentieth Century,” in Hispanic Crafts of the Southwest, ed. Wroth, 5. Frank Applegate, “Spanish Colonial Arts,” Survey 66 (May 1, 1931): 156 –57. 29. Dickey, New Mexico Village Arts, 53 –55, 104 –12. Ward Alan Minge, “Efectos del Pais: A History of Weaving Along the Rio Grande,” in Spanish Textile Tradition of New Mexico and Colorado, ed. Sarah Nestor (Santa Fe: Museum of New Mexico Press, 1979), 8. Christine Mather, “Works of Art in Frontier New Mexico,” in Colonial Frontiers, ed. Mather, 7–33. Bedsteads, chairs, and high tables were generally owned only by wealthy families and clergymen. Most villagers sat on small wool sacks and used low tables that resembled the furniture of medieval Europe. See E. Boyd, Popular Arts of Spanish New Mexico (Santa Fe: Museum of New Mexico Press, 1974), 21, 171–209, 251–54. 30. Charlene Cerny and Christine Mather, “Textile Production in Twentieth-Century New Mexico,” in Spanish Textile Tradition, ed. Nestor, 168 –70. Boyd, Popular Arts, 192, 260. Dickey, New Mexico Village Arts, 62, 69, 82. 31. William Wroth, “The Flowering and Decline of the Art of the New Mexican Santero: 1780 –1900,” in New Spain’s Far Northern Frontier: Essays on Spain in the American West, 1540– 1821, ed. David J. Weber (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1979), 275 –82. Ross Frank, “The Life of Christ and the New Mexican Santo Tradition,” Catholic Southwest: A Journal of History and Culture 7 (1996): 33 – 44. Dickey, New Mexico Village Arts, 138 –53, 163. See also

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Thomas J. Steele, S.J., Santos and Saints: The Religious Folk Art of Hispanic New Mexico (Santa Fe: Ancient City Press, 1994). 32. Edward Sapir, “Culture, Genuine and Spurious,” American Journal of Sociology 29 (January 1924): 411. The “machine” and its consequences are a principal focus of Stuart Chase, Men and Machines (New York: Macmillan, 1929); Waldo Frank, Our America (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1919); Richard Austin Freeman, Social Decay and Regeneration (New York: Constable & Co., 1921); and Robert S. Lynd and Helen Merrill Lynd, Middletown: A Study in Contemporary American Culture (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1929). See also Warren Susman, Culture and Commitment, 1929– 1945 (New York: G. Braziller, 1973), 3 –8. Far from arising sui generis in twentieth-century America, anxieties over the “machine” echoed ideas expressed by such theorists as Karl Marx, Max Weber, and Sigmund Freud. More narrowly, fears can be traced to the writings of John Ruskin and William Morris in nineteenth-century England and in America’s own turn-of-the-century arts and crafts movement. See Eileen Boris, Art and Labor: Ruskin, Morris, and the Craftsman Ideal in America (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986); and Wendy Kaplan, ed., “The Art That Is Life”: The Arts & Crafts Movement in America, 1875– 1920 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1987). See also T. J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880– 1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 60 –96. 33. Waldo Frank, America Hispaña: A Portrait and a Prospect (New York: Scribners, 1931); and Stuart Chase, Mexico: A Study of Two Americas (New York: Macmillan, 1931). Mary Austin, untitled essay on regional literature, Mary Hunter Austin Papers, file 140, HEH. “Colonial Arts of New Mexico,” New York Times, October 22, 1928. Ruth Laughlin Barker, Caballeros (New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1931), 241. Mary Austin and Frank Applegate, “Spanish Colonial Arts,” unpublished manuscript, 134, NMSRCA. 34. “Life in the Old Houses,” comp. Mrs. Lou Sage Batchen, June 1939, WPA file 5-5-49, #19 (“Gabrielita and Placida”) and #22 (“Fiesta Days”), MNM. Reyes Martínez, “Cooperation,” WPA file A638, Library of Congress. 35. “To a Young Lady Cigarette Smoker,” trans. Lorin W. Brown, WPA file A639, Library of Congress. “Don Simón’s Couplets,” comp. Aurora LuceroWhite, WPA file 5-5-35, #54, MNM. Don Emiliano Baca, “They Do Not Want to Work,” trans. Manuel Berg, WPA file 5-5-12, #66, MNM. 36. “Don Simón,” comp. and trans. Lorin Brown, September 1937, WPA file 5-5-20, #39, MNM. 37. Ruth Laughlin [Barker], “Coronado Country and Its People,” Survey Graphic 29 (May 1940): 282. Barker, Caballeros, 300. 38. Until its incorporation in 1929, the group was known as the Society for the Revival of Spanish Colonial Art. Its initial membership list is found in Marta Weigle, “The First Twenty-five Years of the Spanish Colonial Arts Society,” in Hispanic Arts and Ethnohistory in the Southwest: New Papers Inspired by the Work of E. Boyd, ed. Marta Weigle (Santa Fe: Ancient City Press, 1983), 197, n. 2. See also Marta Weigle, “A Brief History of the Spanish Colonial Arts Society,” in

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Spanish New Mexico, vol. 2: Hispanic Arts in the Twentieth Century, ed. Donna Pierce and Marta Weigle (Santa Fe: Museum of New Mexico Press, 1996), 26 –35. A slightly different membership roll was printed when the society was incorporated in 1929. It is filed with the Spanish Colonial Arts Society Papers, NMSRCA. 39. Austin to Mrs. Wm. Fields, November 15, 1933, Mary Hunter Austin Papers, Box 1, folder 6, CSWR. Austin to Bronson Cutting, December 9, 1929, Cutting Papers, Box 8. “Spanish Arts-Crafts Display Is Interesting,” SFNM, September 8, 1927. Weigle, “The First Twenty-five Years,” 183. Helen Cramp, “The Old Santo Maker,” New Mexico 9 (November 1931): 46. Untitled and undated speech to the administrative council of the New Mexico Education Association, Austin Papers, Box 127, HEH. 40. Park to Austin, July 7, 1919, Austin Papers, file 4277, HEH. Austin’s unpublished report appears in two manuscripts, “Social Survey of Indian and Mexican Settlements of San Juan and Chamita” and “Social Survey of Taos County,” files 542 and 543, respectively, Austin Papers, HEH. Austin, “Frank Applegate,” 214. Austin’s thinking about Spanish colonial art was undoubtedly stimulated by Aurelio M. Espinosa, an accomplished Stanford scholar who studied the language and lore of the upper Rio Grande for the first five decades of the twentieth century. Austin quoted Espinosa as early as 1919, in her first publication on New Mexico folklore, and in later years she repeatedly drew on his understanding of a Spanish linguistic tradition. (Austin, “New Mexico Folk Poetry,” El Palacio 7 [November 30, 1919]: 146.) Espinosa was in that sense an intellectual godfather of the Spanish arts revival. Two decades before Dana Johnson celebrated “Spanish culture” at the Fiesta and Frank Applegate held forth on manual arts, Espinosa was already researching the distinctively Spanish roots of the villagers’ oral traditions. His work set the foundation for initiatives of the 1930s to record and retell village folklore, and it will discussed in that context. Although the Stanford professor himself had limited practical impact on northern New Mexico’s Spanish revival—he directed his energies toward academic interests, many of them involving Latin America—he provided it with critical intellectual support. For a survey of Espinosa’s life and writing, see J. Manuel Espinosa, ed., The Folklore of Spain in the American Southwest: Traditional Spanish Folk Literature in Northern New Mexico and Southern Colorado (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1985). 41. Applegate to Mary Mowbray-Clarke, April 12, 1925, Mowbray-Clarke Family Papers. 42. See, for example, Elizabeth DeHuff, “Santos y Bultos: Early Craft of Wood Carving Perpetuated in New Mexico Images,” Touring Topics 22 (January 1930): 50 –51, 56; Mary Austin, “Spanish Colonial Furnishings in New Mexico,” Antiques 23 (February 1933): 46 – 49; Nellie Dunton, The Spanish Colonial Ornament (Philadelphia: H. C. Perleberg, 1935); Leonora F. Curtain, “Back to Tin—An Ancient Craft,” Touring Topics 24 (March 1932): 22 –23; and Hester Jones, “New Mexico Embroidered Bedspreads,” El Palacio 37 (September 26 – October 3, 1934): 97–104. 43. Kenneth Dauber, “Pueblo Pottery and the Politics of Regional Identity,”

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JSW 32 (Winter 1990): 577. Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant, “Mary Austin: A Portrait,” Saturday Review of Literature 11 (September 8, 1934): 96. On the marketing and display of Indian arts, see Edwin L. Wade, “The Ethnic Art Market in the American Southwest, 1880 –1980,” in Objects and Others: Essays on Museums and Material Culture, ed. George W. Stocking, Jr. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 167–91; and Molly Mullin, “The Patronage of Difference: Making Indian Art ‘Art, Not Ethnology,’” Cultural Anthropology 7 (Winter 1992): 395 – 424. 44. Scholars have described several dimensions of the Anglo fascination with Indians. Leah Dilworth associates primitivism with “idealized versions of history, spirituality, and unalienated labor.” See Imagining Indians in the Southwest: Persistent Visions of a Primitive Past (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1996), 3. Barbara Babcock posits primitivism as a domesticating “Orientalism,” a form of patriarchical power. See Babcock, “‘A New Mexico Rebecca’: Imaging Pueblo Women,” JSW 32 (Winter 1990): 400 – 437. Her colleague Marta Weigle, who advances the term “Southwesternism,” explores the economic rewards of the primitive. See Marta Weigle, “Southwest Lures: Innocents Detoured, Incensed Determined,” JSW 32 (Winter 1990): 499 –539. Kenneth Dauber (“Pueblo Pottery”) insists that primitivism cannot be understood apart from the proximate economic and political motives of its bearers. For an overview of primitivism, see Mariana Torgovnick, Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990). 45. A well-known social theory takes a contrary position. It locates los paisanos at the bottom of a “tri-cultural” hierarchy. First expressed by John J. Bodine in “A Tri-Ethnic Trap: The Spanish Americans in Taos,” in Spanishspeaking People of the United States (Proceedings of the 1968 American Ethnological Society), ed. June Helm (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1968), 145 –53, the theory has been reiterated in recent years by the anthropologist Sylvia Rodríguez: “The Hispanos [of Taos] were seen as having subjugated the Indians and then having been deservedly subjugated themselves. They partook of the corruption but not the enlightenment of European civilization, while their perceived backwardness had none of the primordial spirituality imputed to the Indians.” See Sylvia Rodríguez, “Land, Water, and Ethnic Identity in Taos,” in Land, Water, and Culture, ed. Briggs and Van Ness, 345; and “Art, Tourism, and Race Relations in Taos: Toward a Sociology of the Art Colony,” Journal of Anthropological Research 45 (Spring 1989): 83 –87. 46. “Historical and Beautiful Santuario at Chimayo Being Sold; Priceless, Storied Relics Peddled as Curios,” SFNM, February 9, 1929. Marta Weigle and Peter White, The Lore of New Mexico (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico, 1988), 41– 44. Weigle, “The First Twenty-five Years,” 184 –86. 47. Applegate to Austin, February 20 and February 22, 1929, and undated newspaper editorial, Austin Papers, Box 56, HEH. The archbishop agreed to the transfer on the condition that the chapel end its association with miracleseeking pilgrims. The pilgrimages continue to this day. Mike Otero to Sen. Bronson Cutting, April 19, 1929, Cutting Papers, Box 8. 48. Applegate’s association with the Newman Gallery and a local venture,

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the Spanish & Indian Trading Company, is documented in the Mowbray-Clarke Family Papers. 49. “Grandes Premios Libres,” 1931, Austin Papers, Box 131, HEH. McCormick to Austin, October 15, 1931, Austin Papers, file 3641, HEH. McCormick’s aesthetic demands were legendary. He once criticized a rug made by unemployed miners for its “atrocious colors” and a “design that lacks a great deal of being artistic.” “[I]f these out-of-work miners are to be encouraged to make rugs to help support themselves,” he wrote, “they might as well do an artistic job of it.” McCormick to Austin, October 5, 1932, Austin Papers, file 3643, HEH. 50. McCormick to Austin, October 15, 1931, Austin Papers, file 3641, HEH. Dr. P. J. Murphy of Dallas and C. G. Michalis of New York to Preston McCrossen, January 21, 1931, and March 5, 1931, respectively, Spanish Colonial Arts Society Records, Correspondence File. Withers Woolford, “Revival of the Native Crafts,” New Mexico 9 (September 1931): 26. “Report: Society for the Revival of Spanish Colonial Art,” 1931, Austin Papers, file 487, HEH. 51. George I. Sánchez, Forgotten People: A Study of New Mexicans (1940; Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996), 22, 73 –74. Thomas R. López, Prospects for the Spanish American Culture of New Mexico (San Francisco: R and E Research Associates, 1974), 85. Lynne Marie Getz, Schools of Their Own: The Education of Hispanos in New Mexico, 1850– 1940 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1997), 108. Forrest, Preservation of the Village, 12. 52. Quoted in William Wroth, “New Hope in Hard Times: Hispanic Crafts Are Revived during Troubled Years,” El Palacio 89 (Summer 1983): 25. Forrest, Preservation of the Village, 67. 53. Austin to Gerald Cassidy, February 27, 1927, Austin Papers, CSWR. Nina Otero-Warren to Helen McCrossen, November 10, 1930, and meeting minutes, October 8, 1930, Spanish Colonial Arts Society Records, Miscellaneous Reports, 1930 –34. Weigle, “The First Twenty-five Years,” 191. 54. Anonymous to John Conway, President of the Spanish-American Normal School, May 31, 1927, and Conway to Gov. Richard Dillion, April 7, 1928, Richard Charles Dillion Papers, Box 16, folder 5, CSWR. Clara Olsen to Mrs. Cutting, November 15, 1935, Cutting Papers, Box 11. Catalog of the Spanish-American Normal School, 1938 –39, Clara H. Olsen Collection, Box 3, folder 47. Joseph B. Grant to Mrs. Olivia M. Cutting, April 10, 1936, Cutting Papers, Box 89. See also Guillermo Lux, Politics and Education in Hispanic New Mexico: From the Spanish American Normal School to the Northern New Mexico Community College (Española: Northern New Mexico Community College, 1984). 55. Leo Favrot, General Education Board, to Dr. L. S. Tireman, June 5, 1931, Cutting Papers, Box 9. Paul L. Fickinger, “The San Jose Training School: New Mexico’s Great Experiment Making Progress,” New Mexico School Review 11 (December 1931): 14 –17. First Annual Report of the San Jose Training School, 1, University of New Mexico Secretary Division Records, 1928 – 48, Box 13, CSWR. Getz, Schools of Their Own, 66 –82. On Tireman, see David L. Bachelor, Educational Reform in New Mexico: Tireman, San José and Nambé (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1991). 56. First Annual Report, 12, University of New Mexico Secretary Division

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Records, 1928 – 48, Box 13. Austin to Bronson Cutting, January 10, 1931, Austin Papers, Box 57, HEH. Consider the following sample of Austin’s comments. On UNM president J. F. Zimmerman: “Bronson Cutting is counting on me to put the fear of God in his soul, but . . . I have first to find if the man has any soul.” Austin to A. D. Ficke, November 11, 1930, Austin Papers, Box 1, CSWR. On Tireman: “Mr. Tireman . . . is totally unacquainted with the history, culture, capabilities, racial and social background of the children.” Austin to Bronson Cutting, November 24, 1930, Cutting Papers, Box 9. 57. Austin to Zimmerman, November 25, 1930, Austin Papers, Box 60, HEH. Austin, “Rural Education in New Mexico,” University of New Mexico Bulletin 2 (December 1, 1931): 28 –29. 58. Tireman to Cutting, June 27, 1934, Cutting Papers, Box 21. Loyd Tireman, “Some Aspects of Rural Education in Mexico,” University of New Mexico Bulletin 2 (1931), 25. Forrest, Preservation of the Village, 72. Austin, “Rural Education,” 28. L. S. Tireman, Mela Sedillo Brewster, Lolita Pooler, “The San Jose Project,” NMQ 3 (November 1933): 209 –10. 59. Brice H. Sewell, “Do You Know?” “Why Vocational Education?” and “The Old Skills Are Again Being Practiced in Mora Valley,” New Mexico School Review 12 (May 1933): 23; 14 (February 1935): 6 –7; and 16 (September 1936): 21. See also William Wroth, “New Hope in Hard Times,” 25 –27. 60. Mary W. Coan, “Handicraft Arts Revived,” New Mexico 13 (February 1935): 14 –15, 52. Brice Sewell, “Spanish Colonial Furniture Bulletin” (1935), Adella Collier Collection, Box 5, file 136, NMSRCA. “Espanola Sets Pace in Educational Experiment in Vocational Work,” unidentified newspaper clipping, Cutting Papers, Box 11. 61. Sewell quoted in Wroth, “New Hope in Hard Times,” 31, and in a letter from Tireman to Cutting, December 12, 1934, Cutting Papers, Box 11. Wayne Mauzy, “Santa Fe’s Native Market,” El Palacio 40 (March 25, April 1–8, 1936), 68 –70. Ross Calvin, “Thinking toward the Future,” New Mexico 10 (November 1932): 7. “Let’s Keep It New Mexico, Is Eloquent Plea of Lea Rowland,” SFNM, January 8, 1937. Curtain opened her shop in 1934, a year after the society’s first sales outlet closed. See Sarah Nestor, The Native Market of the Spanish New Mexican Craftsmen, Santa Fe, 1933– 1940 (Santa Fe: Colonial New Mexico Historical Foundation, 1978). 62. When the society was reactivated in 1938, the names of eight prominent Hispanas appeared on the membership roll. Members voted at the initial meeting to affiliate the group “with interested Societies of the local Spanish people.” Weigle, “The First Twenty-five Years,” 194. 63. Espinosa quoted in Program of the Feria Artesana, 1982, Branch Family Papers, NMSRCA. New Mexico Dept. of Vocational Education Bulletin. “Spanish Colonial Tin Work,” by Carmen Espinosa (Santa Fe: New Mex. Dept. of Vocational Education, 1937), n.p. A sample of Gilberto’s interest is “New Mexico Santos,” New Mexico 13 (March and April 1935): 9 –11, 43, and 22 –23, 36, respectively. On Sewell’s staff, see Nestor, The Native Market, 11–12. 64. Recorded interviews with Concha Ortiz y Pino de Kleven, August 21, 1975, and July 7, 1986, Concha Ortiz y Pino de Kleven Papers, Box 2, CSWR.

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Mary W. Coan, “La Corrida del Gallo at Galisteo,” New Mexico 11 (December 1933): 50. Personal interview with Kleven, January 13, 1993, Albuquerque. On José Ortiz y Pino and his Galisteo ranch, see José Ortiz y Pino, Jr., Don José, the Last Patrón (Santa Fe: Sunstone Press, 1981). 65. Excerpt from SFNM, October 12, 1982, Ortiz y Pino Papers, CSWR. Recorded interviews of August 21, 1975, and July 7, 1986. Personal interview, January 13, 1993. 66. Whaley, Nina Otero-Warren of Santa Fe, 66. Getz, Schools of Their Own, 41. As Joan Jensen notes, New Mexico suffragists, almost all of whom were Anglo, had trouble recruiting Hispanas. See Joan Jensen, “‘Disfranchisement Is a Disgrace’: Women and Politics in New Mexico, 1900 –1914,” NMHR 56 (Spring 1981): 5 –35. 67. Ruth Loomis Skeen, “The Daughter of a Spanish Don,” Holland’s Magazine 38 (August 1919); “Send Mrs. Warren to Congress,” undated excerpt, Albuquerque Herald; and “Spanish Don’s Daughter among 4 Women in Race for Congress,” New York Herald Tribune, September 14, 1922, Bergere Family Papers, Box 12, folder 122. Opposed by Democrat John Morrow, a relative newcomer, Otero lost the general election by ten percentage points after capturing only half the Hispano vote. 68. Adelina Otero, “My People,” Survey 66 (May 1931): 149 –50. Getz, Schools of Their Own, 106 –7. Otero-Warren to Dr. Hermon M. Bumpus [sic], January 30, 1930, and “Extension Work,” Bergere Family Papers, Box 3, folder 43. 69. “Spanish Colonial Arts Society Commences 5th Year of Activity,” Austin Papers, Box 131, HEH. Wroth, “Hispanic Southwestern Craft Traditions,” 6. Undated memorandum on village crafts in Porvenir, ca. 1932, University of New Mexico Secretary Division Records, Box 26. Ruth Laughlin Barker, “The Craft of Chimayo,” Touring Topics 22 (June 1930): 36 –39, 55. E. Boyd to T. M. Pearce, April 22, 1965, Spanish Colonial Arts Society Records. 70. Beatrice Ortiz, El Rito, to Mr. [Preston] McCrossen, November 21, 1930. Mrs. Ismael Ulibarrí, Tierra Amarilla, to Mrs. McCrossen, August 27, 1931. Other letters were sent by Adolfo Salazar, Chama, July 2, 1931; D. T. Tórrez, Truchas, July 26, 1930; and Mrs. Felipe Chávez, Galisteo, February 25, 1931, Spanish Colonial Arts Society Records, Correspondence, 1930 –31. 71. Brice H. Sewell, “A New Type of School,” New Mexico School Review 15 (May 1935): 49 –50. Wroth, “New Hope in Hard Times,” 26. On Barela, see “WPA Art Work Shown in Museum,” El Palacio 40 (April 15 –29, 1936): 93, and “New York Hails Barela Wood Carvings,” El Palacio 41 (September 30 –October 7–14, 1936): 84. Mildred Crews, Wendell Anderson, and Judson Crews, Patrocino Barela: Taos Wood Carver (Taos, New Mex.: Taos Recordings and Publications, 1976), 6 –7. See also Edward Gonzales, Spirit Ascendant: The Life of Patrocino Barela (Santa Fe: Red Crane Books, 1996), 35 –65. 72. Arthur Campa, “Survey of Spanish and Indian Crafts in the Southwest,” a report for the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, 1934 –36, 1, 27, 273 – 77, Arthur Campa Collection, Southwest Museum, Los Angeles. 73. Forrest, Preservation of the Village, 156 –57.

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74. Harper, Córdova, and Oberg, Man and Resources, 105 –8. Forrest, Preservation of the Village, 140 –50. Gonzales, The Spanish-Americans, 125 –26. 75. On parallel considerations regarding Indian arts, see Mullin, “The Patronage of Difference,” 411–13. 76. Ortiz y Pino was also a politician. She won seats in the New Mexico legislature in 1937, 1941, and 1943, and she was the first woman in any state legislature named majority whip. 77. Briggs, Wood Carvers of Córdova, 46 –55. 78. Forrest, Preservation of the Village, 109. Deutsch, No Separate Refuge, 188 –96. On the broader effects within the Rio Arriba, see Esther Lanigan Stineman, Mary Austin: Song of a Maverick (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1989), 177–78; and Rodríguez, “Art, Tourism, and Race Relations in Taos,” 88 –90. On the consequences of primitivism in Appalachia, see David Whisnant, All That Is Native and Fine: The Politics of Culture in an American Region (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983), 261–67. 79. Along with a healthy dose of craft training, the Spanish-American Normal School offered courses in cosmetics, stenography, business administration, and auto mechanics. John E. Lawler, “Spanish-American Normal School,” New Mexico Highway Journal 8 (October 1930): 26. See also Getz, Schools of Their Own, 117. 80. Coan, “Handicraft Arts Revived,” 14. McCormick to Austin, November 4, 1930, Austin Papers, file 3639, HEH. Cramp, “The Old Santo Maker,” 20, 46. Mary Austin, “Celso Gallegos, Last of the Santo-Makers,” Chicago Evening Post, “Magazine of the Art World,” October 7, 1930.

Chapter 6. Regionalism and the Literature of the Soil, 1928-1938 1. “New Books of the Month,” El Palacio 10 (January 22, 1921), 25. The final line, a biblical reference, is from Proverbs 29:18. 2. For an overview of painting in northern New Mexico, see Charles Eldredge, Julie Schimmel, and William H. Truettner, The Art of New Mexico, 1900– 1945: Paths to Taos and Santa Fe (Washington, D.C.: National Museum of American Art, 1986); and Van Deren Coke, Taos and Santa Fe: The Artist’s Environment, 1882– 1942 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1963). 3. For overviews of the interwar writers and their work, see Marta Weigle and Kyle Fiore, Santa Fe and Taos: The Writer’s Era, 1916 – 1941 (Santa Fe: Ancient City Press, 1982), 9 –73; and Arrell Morgan Gibson, The Santa Fe and Taos Colonies: Age of the Muses, 1900– 1942 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1983), 179 –98. For critical commentary, see Lawrence Clark Powell, Southwest Classics: The Creative Literature of the Arid Lands (Pasadena, Calif.: Ward Ritchie, 1974), 57–135, 217–29. 4. George J. Sánchez, Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture, and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900– 1945 (New York: Oxford University Press,

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1993), 17–37. David G. Gutiérrez, Walls and Mirrors: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the Politics of Ethnicity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 40 –56. Neil Foley, The White Scourge: Mexicans, Blacks, and Poor Whites in Texas Cotton Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 40 –63. 5. Quoted in Gutiérrez, Walls and Mirrors, 54; and Foley, White Scourge, 54. 6. Gutiérrez, Walls and Mirrors, 71–74. See also Abraham Hoffman, Unwanted Mexican Americans in the Great Depression: Repatriation Pressures, 1929– 1939 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1974), 83 –132. A good number of the repatriates were American born and thus citizens of the United States. 7. D. H. Dinwoodie, “Deportation: The Immigration Service and the Chicano Labor Movement in the 1930s,” NMHR 52 (July 1977): 193 –206. Carey McWilliams, North from Mexico: The Spanish-speaking People of the United States (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1948; Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1990), 80 –81. Manuel Gamio, Mexican Immigration to the United States (1930; New York: Arno Press, 1969), 208 –16. See also Philip Stevenson, “Deporting Jesús,” Nation 143 (July 18, 1936): 67–69. 8. Powell, Southwest Classics, 121–34. 9. Willa Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927; New York: Vintage, 1971), 7. 10. Cather, Death Comes, 147– 48, 150, 171. On Martínez, see A. Gabriel Meléndez, So All Is Not Lost: The Poetics of Print in Nuevomexicano Communities, 1834 – 1958 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1997), 18 –20; and E. A. Mares, ed., Padre Martínez: New Perspectives from Taos (Taos, New Mex.: Millicent Rogers Museum, 1988). 11. Rebecca Smith, “The Southwest in Fiction,” Saturday Review of Literature 25 (May 16, 1942): 12 –13, 37, reprinted in T. M. Pearce and A. P. Thompson, eds., Southwesterners Write: The American Southwest in Stories and Articles by Thirty-two Contributors (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1946), 344 –51. Mary Austin, Earth Horizon (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1932), 359. 12. Powell, Southwest Classics, 57–60. 13. On the writer’s father, Harvey B. Fergusson, see Calvin A. Roberts, “H. B. Fergusson, 1848 –1915: New Mexican Spokesman for Political Reform,” NMHR 57 (July 1982): 237–55. 14. Harvey Fergusson, Blood of the Conquerors (New York: Knopf, 1921), 11, 12, 17–19, 24, 27, 125, 187. 15. Harvey Fergusson, Rio Grande (1931; New York: William Morrow, 1967), xvi, 77, 99 –103. On Fergusson’s perception of Hispano decline, see Arthur G. Pettit, “The Decline and Fall of the New Mexican Great House in the Novels of Harvey Fergusson: A Classical Example of Anglo-American Ethnocentricity,” NMHR 51 (July 1976): 173 –91; and Images of the Mexican American in Fiction and Film (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1980), 98 –104. For a discussion of Fergusson’s historical method, see Robert Gish, “‘Pretty, but Is It History?’: The Legacy of Harvey Fergusson’s Rio Grande,” NMHR 60 (April 1985): 173 –92. 16. Ruth Laughlin Barker, Caballeros (New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1931),

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2 –3, 18, 301. One anonymous reviewer (NMQ 1 [November 1931]: 421–22) praised Barker for taking the reader “into the homes and hearts of the Spanishspeaking people.” E. Dana Johnson (NMHR 6 [October 1931]: 420 –23) lauded Barker for “help[ing] to make this culture live.” “Qué triste,” he exclaimed, “that Caballeros is not all of Santa Fe; but qué alegre, that it is still so much of Santa Fe!” 17. Barker, Caballeros, 241, 269. 18. Quoted in Marta Weigle, “Publishing in Santa Fe, 1915 – 40,” El Palacio 90 (annual issue, 1984): 13. The best anthology of the regionalist persuasion is Mabel Major and T. M. Pearce, eds., Southwest Heritage: A Literary History with Bibliographies (1938; Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1972). For a separate overview, see Gerald Nash, The American West in the Twentieth Century: A Short History of an Urban Oasis (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1977), 121–26. For a broader perspective on the regionalist moment in the West, see Richard W. Etulain, Re-imagining the Modern American West: A Century of Fiction, History, and Art (Tucson: University of Arizona, 1996), 79 –103. 19. “Points of View,” Southwest Review 14 (July 1929): 474 –94. 20. “Writer’s Round Table Not Only Rounds Up Writers of Region but Also Molds Materials and Methods into Philosophy of Regionalism,” The Candle, July 12, 1933, DeHuff Papers, Box 2, CSWR. Mary Austin, “Regional Culture in the Southwest,” in America in the Southwest: A Regional Anthology, ed. T. M. Pearce and Telfair Hendon (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1933), 120. B. A. Botkin, “The Folk in Literature: An Introduction to the New Regionalism,” Folk-Say: A Regional Miscellany 1 (1929), 16. 21. Pearce’s correspondence with Fletcher is filed in the Thomas Matthew Pearce Papers, Box 30, folder 21, CSWR. B. A. Botkin, “The New Mexico Round Table on Regionalism,” NMQ 3 (August 1933): 152 –59. John Crowe Ransom, “The Aesthetic of Regionalism,” American Review 2 (January 1934): 290 – 310, esp. 304 –8. 22. John Dollard, Caste and Class in a Southern Town (New York: Harper, 1949). On Odum and southern social science, see Daniel T. Rodgers, “Regionalism and the Burdens of Progress,” in Region, Race, and Reconstruction: Essays in Honor of C. Vann Woodward, ed. J. Morgan Kousser and James M. McPherson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 3 –26. For a survey of the varieties of regionalism throughout interwar America, see Robert Dorman, Revolt of the Provinces: The Regionalist Movement in America, 1920– 1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993). 23. Carey McWilliams, The Education of Carey McWilliams (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1978), 27, 62 –66. Carey McWilliams, The New Regionalism in American Literature (Seattle: University of Washington Book Store, 1930), 23 – 26. Dorman, Revolt of the Provinces, 40 – 45. 24. Gutiérrez, Walls and Mirrors, 110 –14. Although scheduled to take place in Albuquerque, the convention was canceled after locals learned of the university’s involvement with an apparent Popular Front group. The brouhaha forced Sánchez and Campa to resign from El Congreso. See Mario García, Mexican Americans: Leadership, Ideology, & Identity, 1930– 1960 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale

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University Press, 1989), 148 –50. On Popular Front literature, see Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (New York: Verso, 1996). 25. T. M. Pearce, The Beloved House (Caldwell, Id.: Caxton Printers, 1940) and Literary America, 1903– 1934: The Mary Austin Letters (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1979). 26. Dudley Wynn, “The Southwestern Regional Straddle,” NMQ 5 (February 1935): 14. When Wynn took over editorial duties at the Quarterly from T. M. Pearce in 1940, he announced a more practical approach to the region: “Soil erosion and a high infant mortality rate are as much a part of the picture at present as is the existence of corridos, folk plays, and a colorful past.” (NMQ 10 [February 1940]: 43 – 44). 27. Kyle Crichton, “Cease Not Living,” NMQ 5 (May 1935): 73 –76. Denning, The Cultural Front, 241. Coming from the democratic Left, Crichton’s criticism in the Quarterly was supplemented by three Marxist writers: Aron Krich and Vincent Garoffolo, “Regionalism and Politics,” 7 (November 1937): 261–69; and Philip Stevenson, “The Outlook for Folk Art,” 5 (February 1935): 40 – 47. Krich and Garoffolo, casting the regionalists as paragons of “bourgeois democracy” and homegrown fascism, overestimated the “social awakening” of the New Mexican masses. Stevenson argued tendentiously that “the machine” would cease to divide utility from art once emancipated from the hands of capital. 28. T. M. Pearce, “Rockefeller Center on the Camino,” NMQ 5 (May 1935): 85 –86. 29. Announcement of the Committee on Folk Lore of the Archaeological Society of New Mexico, El Palacio 1 (November 1913): 8. Statement by Mary Houghton Harroun at a meeting of the Fifteen Club, April 13, 1917, Mary Houghton Harroun Collection of New Mexico Folktales, Box 111, MNM. Mary Austin, “Native Drama in Our Southwest,” The Nation 124 (April 20, 1927): 437–39. Elizabeth Willis DeHuff, “Old World Christmas Drama in New Mexico,” New Mexico Highway Journal 8 (December 1930): 7–9. Mary R. Van Stone, “El Niño Perdido,” El Palacio 34 (May 24 –31, 1933): 163 –65. 30. Tamara Hareven, “The Search for Generational Memory: Tribal Rites in Industrial Society,” Daedalus 107 (Fall 1978): 137– 49. On WPA-sponsored activities in New Mexico, see Marta Weigle, New Mexicans in Cameo and Camera: New Deal Documentation of Twentieth-Century Lives (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1985), xiii–xx; and Lorin W. Brown (with Marta Weigle and Charles L. Briggs), Hispano Folklife of New Mexico: The Lorin W. Brown Federal Writers’ Project Manuscripts (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1978), 239 –52. On the project’s broader dimensions, see Monty Noam Penkower, The Federal Writers’ Project: A Study in Government Patronage of the Arts (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977). 31. Brown was raised in Taos by Vicente and Juanita Martínez, his maternal grandparents. For a list of all project employees, see Brown, Hispano Folklife of New Mexico, 248 –50. 32. Nina Otero[-Warren], Old Spain in Our Southwest (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1936), 142 – 48, 179 –84. Aurora Lucero-White [Lea], Folk-Dances of the

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Spanish Colonials of New Mexico (Santa Fe: Examiner, 1937); The Folklore of New Mexico, vol. 1 (Santa Fe: Seton Village Press, 1941); Los Hispanos (Denver, Colo.: Sage Books, 1947); and Literary Folklore of the Hispanic Southwest (San Antonio, Tex.: Naylor, 1953). Meléndez, So All Is Not Lost, 179 –82. 33. Otero[-Warren], Old Spain in Our Southwest, 64, 115. 34. Aurora Lucero-White, “Fiestas in New Mexico,” September 8, 1936, 11– 12, WPA file 5-5-2, #50, MNM. 35. Historical Society of New Mexico, No. 16, Aurelio Espinosa, “The Spanish Language in New Mexico and Southern Colorado,” 1911, 6, MNM. Aurelio Espinosa, “Spanish Folk-Lore in New Mexico,” NMHR 1 (April 1926): 135, 150. Evidence of Austin’s reliance on Espinosa is found in “New Mexico Folk Poetry,” El Palacio 7 (November 30, 1919): 146; and Mary Austin, The Land of Journeys’ Ending (New York: Century, 1924), 316. 36. Résumé in “New Mexican Romances and Corridos,” comp. and ed. Aurora Lucero-White, September 8, 1937, WPA file 5-5-35, MNM. Aurelio M. Espinosa, “Revolt of the Ignorant,” NMQ 6 (May 1936): 80. 37. Brown, Hispano Folklife of New Mexico, 191, 199. 38. Cleofas Jaramillo, Romance of a Little Village Girl (San Antonio, Tex.: Naylor, 1955), 119, 130 – 42; and Shadows of the Past (Santa Fe: Seton Village Press, 1941), 96. The murder stunned residents of Santa Fe, in part because it was committed by an African American. “Santa Fe for the first time has gone through the indescribably sickening shock of having the Negro Crime committed at her doors,” wrote New Mexican editor Dana Johnson. He called for the “barring in future of negroes” from Santa Fe. “The thing to do is keep them out. . . . [T]hey do not belong here.” Quoted in Oliver La Farge, Santa Fe: The Autobiography of a Southwestern Town (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1959), 333 –34. The suspect, apprehended in Albuquerque, was returned to Santa Fe, tried, convicted, and executed. Bronson Cutting to Clifford McCarthy, Bronson M. Cutting Papers, Box 32, Library of Congress. 39. “Aim of Organization Is to Preserve Folk Lore of New Mexico,” SFNM, August 29, 1938. Personal interview with Anita Gonzales Thomas, Santa Fe, January 19, 1993. Elizabeth DeHuff, “Intriguing Mexican Dishes,” Holland’s, the Magazine of the South 54 (March 1935): 34, 47. Jaramillo, Romance, 173 –77. Cleofas M. Jaramillo, Cuentos de Hogar (El Campo, Tex.: Citizen Press, 1939). 40. On the “hacienda” impulse, see Raymund A. Paredes, “The Evolution of Chicano Literature,” in Three American Literatures: Essays in Chicano, Native American, and Asian-American Literature for Teachers of American Literature, ed. Houston A. Baker, Jr. (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1982), 52. For a more sympathetic view, see Tey Diana Rebolledo, “Tradition and Mythology: Signatures of the Landscape in Chicana Literature,” in The Desert Is No Lady: Southwestern Landscapes in Women’s Writing and Art, ed. Vera Norwood and Janice Monk (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1987), 98 –105. A mixed reading is offered by Genaro Padilla in “Imprisoned Narrative? Or Lies, Secrets, and Silence in New Mexico Women’s Autobiography,” in Criticism in the Borderlands: Studies in Chicano Literature, Culture,

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and Ideology, ed. Hectór Calderón and José David Saldívar (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1991), 43 –60. 41. “Penitente” no longer carries its once-pejorative connotation. The full name of the confraternity is La Fraternidad Piadosa de Nuestro Padre Jesús Nazareno. See Fray Angelico Chavez, “The Penitentes of New Mexico,” NMHR 29 (April 1954): 97–99; and Marta Weigle, Brothers of Light, Brothers of Blood: The Penitentes of the Southwest (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1976), xi. 42. “La Constitución,” an anonymous translation of one chapter’s governing constitution, issued by Hermano Mayor Antonio José Romero, February 13, 1875, Penitente Collection, Morada files, Kit Carson Memorial Foundation, Taos, New Mex. Penitente membership fell off rapidly after 1920 and numbered only about 3,000 in 1960. S. Omar Barker, “Los Penitentes,” Overland Monthly and Out West 82 (April 1924), 151–52; and Weigle, Brothers, 96 –98. 43. Weigle, Brothers, 155 –78. Independent chapters often modified the general pattern of Holy Week devotions. In most cases they took steps to minimize the risk of permanent injury or death. For example, the weight of the Cristo was ordinarily supported by a small platform. Legends of crucified members have never been substantiated. See George Mills and Richard Grove, Lucifer and Crucifer: The Enigma of the Penitentes (Colorado Springs, Colo.: Taylor Museum, 1966), 5 – 44. 44. Reyes Martínez, “Curious Practices,” as told by Crecencia Garcia of Arroyo Hondo, March 13, 1937, WPA file 5-5-2, #20, MNM. Statement of Andrés Mora, February 2, 1989, East Mountain Oral History Collection, folder 13, CSWR. Statement of Manuel Martínez, Las Vegas Oral Histories, file 5. See also Lorenzo de Córdova (Lorin Brown), Echoes of the Flute (Santa Fe: Ancient City Press, 1972), 45. 45. Statement of Luis Bustos, Rociada, Las Vegas Oral Histories, file 6. On the Brotherhood’s service, see Juan Amaro Hernández, Mutual Aid for Survival: The Case of the Mexican American (Malabar, Fla.: Krieger, 1983), 16 –22; and Richard E. Ahlborn, “The Penitente Moradas of Abiquiú,” 124, E. Boyd Collection, #220. 46. Ida Louise Kenney, “Cross Bearers of New Mexico,” Overland Monthly 56 (September 1910): 295. Criticism by travel writers includes H. T. Wilson, Historical Sketch of Santa Fe, New Mexico (Chicago: Hotel World Publishing Co., 1880), 48; and D. J. Flynn, “Holy Week among the Penitentes,” Harper’s Weekly 38 (May 26, 1894): 490. On the missionary’s perspective, see, for example, Alexander M. Darley, The Passionists of the Southwest (1893; Glorieta, New Mex.: Rio Grande Press, 1968); Martin Rist, “The Penitentes According to the Rev. and Mrs. Thomas Harwood,” ca. 1872, reprinted in Illif Review 23 (Winter 1966), HEH; and the Rev. William E. Barton, D.D., “The Penitentes of New Mexico,” Congregational Education Society of Boston, 8, Dorothy Woodward Penitente Collection, NMSRCA. 47. Warren M’Veigh, “The Fanatical Fellows,” Las Vegas Daily Optic, April 2, 1895 (reprinted from the Dallas News), filed in the Woodward Penitente Collec-

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tion, Box 5, file 103. For a complete survey of accounts of the Penitentes, see Marta Weigle, comp., A Penitente Bibliography (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1976). 48. George Wharton James, “The Penitente Flagellants of New Mexico,” unpublished manuscript, James Papers, Box 5. Charles F. Lummis, “The Penitent Brothers,” Cosmopolitan 7 (May 1889): 45 –51, and Some Strange Corners of Our Country (1892; Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1989), 91–92. The San Mateo setting and the Chaves family are described in Marc Simmons, The Little Lion of the Southwest: A Life of Manuel Antonio Chaves (Chicago: Sage Books, 1973), 198 –219. 49. When the journalist Carl Taylor was found murdered in 1936 outside Albuquerque, the national press pounced on the rumor that a “Penitente torture cult” was responsible. See, for example, “Blood in New Mexico,” Time 27 (March 9, 1936): 56 –57, and “‘Penitent’ Americans Torture Themselves,” Cleveland Plain Dealer, March 15, 1936. 50. “Los Hermanos Penitentes,” El Palacio 8 (January 31, 1920): 3. Luis Martínez to Ned Gold, April 14, 1936, and “Los Penitentes,” n.p., n.d., 4, WPA, Box 14, folder 141, NMSRCA. 51. New Mexico State Highway Department, “Roads to Cibola: What to See in New Mexico and How to Get There,” ca. 1932, and “Uncle Sam’s Medieval Citizens and Their Passion Play,” Literary Digest (May 15, 1920), 68, Woodward Penitente Collection, Box 5, folder 106. Harvey Company postcard, n.d., Woodward Penitente Collection, Box 5, folder 82. Maurice Davis, “Those Who Still Mortify the Flesh,” Baltimore Sun, April 16, 1933. “Governor Sees Penitentes in Ceremonies at Abiquiu,” SFNM, March 31, 1923. 52. Austin, Land of Journeys’ Ending, 350 –72. Robert Bright, Death and Life of Little Jo (1944; Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1972). Fray Angelico Chavez, “The Penitente Thief,” in New Mexico Triptych (Paterson, N.J.: St. Anthony Guild Press, 1940), 23 –55. 53. Raymond Otis, “Medievalism in America,” El Artesano (June 1933), in Woodward Penitente Collection, Box 5, file 106. Alice Corbin Henderson, “Old Spain in New Mexico,” 13 –14. On medievalism in northern New Mexico, see Marta Weigle, “On Coyotes and Crosses: That Which Is Wild and Wooden of the Twentieth-Century Southwest,” in Essays on the Changing Images of the Southwest, ed. Richard Francaviglia and David Narrett (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1994), 83 –89. 54. “Santa Fe Has Unique Place in Literature,” SFNM, August 7, 1926. Weigle and Fiore, Santa Fe and Taos, 10 –14. T. M. Pearce, Alice Corbin Henderson (Austin, Tex.: Steck-Vaughn, 1969), 12 –20. 55. Alice Corbin [Henderson], Red Earth: Poems of New Mexico (Chicago: R. F. Seymour, 1920), 20, 42. 56. Lawrence C. Kelly, The Assault on Assimilation: John Collier and the Origins of Indian Policy Reform (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1983), 217–18. Weigle and Fiore, Santa Fe and Taos, 19. See also Alice Corbin Henderson, “Death of the Pueblos,” New Republic 29 (November 1922): 11–13. 57. Alice Corbin Henderson, Brothers of Light: The Penitentes of the Southwest

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(New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1937). For views of contemporaries, see Oliver La Farge, “The Penitente Book,” NMQ 19 (Spring 1949): 75 –79; T. M. Pearce (untitled review), NMQ 7 (May 1937): 149; and Dorothy Woodward (untitled review), NMHR 12 (April 1937): 204 –6. 58. Henderson, Brothers of Light, 4, 27, 75, 81. 59. Kyle Crichton, “Cease Not Living,” NMQ 5 (May 1935): 75. Henderson, Brothers of Light, 9, 37, 123 –24. 60. Raymond Otis, Miguel of the Bright Mountain (1936; Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1977), 32. Raymond to Stu[art] Otis, February 23, 1938, and Haniel Long to Stuart Otis, August 16, 1938, Raymond Otis Papers, CSWR. Otis took part in regionalist conferences and was one of four founders of Writers Editions, the Santa Fe publishing venture. 61. Obituary, n.d., Otis Papers. Otis letter to editor, New Mexico Sentinel, December 22, 1937. 62. Otis, Miguel of the Bright Mountain, 20 –21, 25, 32, 71, 90, 158, 186. 63. Ibid., 302. For a contrasting interpretation, see Marta Weigle, “The Penitente Brotherhood in Southwestern Fiction: Notes on Folklife and Literature,” in The American Self: Myth, Ideology, and Popular Culture, ed. Sam B. Girgus (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1981), 226.

Conclusion: The Coronado Cuarto Centennial and the Depletion of Spanish Heritage 1. “State Cuarto-Centennial to Be Unique Exposition,” Carlsbad Argus, February 5, 1937, CCC–RC. 2. Mary Irene Severns, “Tourism in New Mexico: The Promotional Activities of the New Mexico State Tourist Bureau, 1935 –1950” (Master’s thesis, University of New Mexico, 1951), 1–77. Joseph A. Bursey, “Birth of a Slogan— The Land of Enchantment,” July 14, 1970, Joseph Bursey Collection, MNM. Julie Dunleavy, “New Mexico: A Pioneer in Southwestern Tourism,” New Mexico 62 (November 1984): 63 –64. Marta Weigle and Peter White, The Lore of New Mexico (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1988), 77–78. On Route 66, see William E. Tydeman, “A New Deal for Tourists: Route 66 and the Promotion of New Mexico,” NMHR 69 (April 1991): 203 –15. 3. Favored tourist attractions are detailed in New Mexico State Tourist Bureau, “Annual Report for 1938,” 3, Bursey Collection. Coronado Cuarto Centennial Commission, “The Coronado Cuarto Centennial—What It Will Mean to New Mexico”(1938), 35, CCC–RC. Joseph A. Bursey, “State Preparing to Celebrate Coronado’s Quest for Gold in New Mexico; Expect 6 Million Tourists,” Raton Range, January 13, 1937, WPA, Box 10, folder 101, NMSRCA. Members of the Coronado Cuarto Centennial Commission included UNM President James F. Zimmerman, Paul A. F. Walter, Gilberto Espinosa (brother of Aurelio), B. C. Hernández, Erna Fergusson (brother of Harvey), and Concha Ortiz y Pino.

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4. “A ‘Laughing Stock,’” New Mexico Sentinel, March 2, 1937. Coronado Cuarto Centennial Commission, “Coronado Cuarto Centennial,” 3 – 4. George Hammond, Coronado’s Seven Cities (Albuquerque: United States Coronado Exposition Commission, 1940), 78 –79. 5. Coronado Cuarto Centennial Commission, Second Annual Report, 1937, file 7, CCC–MNM. “Coronado Magazine,” official program of the Coronado Cuarto Centennial, file 8, CCC–MNM. Erna Fergusson, “The Coronado Cuarto Centennial,” NMQ 10 (February 1940): 69. The books, written by nationally known historians, made up the Publication Series of the Coronado Cuarto Centennial Commission. Its editor was Dr. George P. Hammond. 6. U.S. Coronado Exposition Commission, press release, May 30, 1940, and “The Coronado Cuarto Centennial,” 3, CCC–RC. Fergusson, “The Coronado Cuarto Centennial,” 67–68. “First Lady Hears of Coronado-400,” New Mexico Sentinel, January 29, 1939. 7. Excerpts from Las Cruces Daily News and Socorro Chieftain, WPA, Box 10, folder 101, NMSRCA. T. M. Pearce, “New Mexico Mirage,” Pearce Papers, Box 5. W. T. Sena and Agapito Rey to editor, Albuquerque Tribune, February 29, 1940, and April 10, 1940, respectively. 8. “Handbook of Old Santa Fe,” 1939, 1, Isabel L. Eckles Collection, Box 417, MNM. Coronado Cuarto Centennial Commission, press release, July 26, 1940, CCC–RC. Elizabeth Willis DeHuff, “People of the Soil,” and Edmund Sherman, “New Mexico Celebrates,” New Mexico 18 (June 1940): 48 and 12, respectively. 9. Open letter from Cuarto Centennial Commission, March 24, 1941, Ortiz y Pino de Kleven Papers, Scrapbook, Box 2, CSWR. First Annual Report of the Coronado Cuarto Centennial Corporation, Box 3, folder 7, CCC–MNM. “The Orto-Centennial,” SFNM, May 4, 1937. 10. “Predict Great Success for Coronado Play to be Presented by Alianza,” Albuquerque Tribune, June 29, 1940, Woodward Penitente Collection, Scrapbook, Box 3, file 81. “Native Dance Previews 1940,” New Mexico Sentinel, April 30, 1939. “Sociedad Folklorica Plans Seven Programs Reviving the Traditional in Coronado Year,” SFNM, February 24, 1940. Gilberto Espinosa, “The Coronado Fourth Centennial,” NMQ 5 (August 1935): 150. Fabiola Cabeza de Baca, “What I Hope for in 1940,” New Mexico Daily Examiner, December 31, 1939, DeHuff Collection, Scrapbook 4, CSWR. “Senator Chávez Speaks,” New Mexico Sentinel, May 29, 1938. Phillip B. Gonzales, “The Political Construction of Latino Nomenclatures in Twentieth-Century New Mexico,” JSW 35 (Summer 1993): 170 –71. 11. A. L. Campa, “Religious Spanish Folk-Drama in New Mexico,” NMQ 2 (February 1932): 3 – 4. Campa, “The New Generation,” “Juan de Oñate was Mexican: The Coronado Cuarto Centennial and the ‘Spaniards,’” and “Our Spanish Character,” in Arthur L. Campa and the Coronado Cuarto Centennial, ed. Anselmo F. Arellano and Julian Josue Vigil (Las Vegas, New Mex.: Editorial Telaraña, 1980), 26, 34 –35, 43 – 44, respectively. 12. James I. Culbert, “Distribution of Spanish-American Population in New Mexico,” Economic Geography 19 (April 1943): 171. George I. Sánchez, Forgotten

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People: A Study of New Mexicans (1940; Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996), 30. Jack E. Holmes, Politics in New Mexico (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1967), 10. Although Sánchez put New Mexico’s 1938 population of “Spanish descent” at 52 percent of the state’s total, his calculations, based on school census data, may have overstated the actual level. Culbert’s sampling of census returns for 1940 found that Hispanos constituted only 44.5 percent of New Mexico’s non-Indian population. 13. New Mexico State Tourist Bureau, “Coronado Cuarto Centennial, 1540 – 1940: An Event Four Centuries in the Making,” CCC–RC. Coronado Cuarto Centennial Commission, Second Annual Report, 1937, 10, file 7, CCC–MNM. Ruth Laughlin, “Coronado Was a Piker,” New Mexico 18 (June 1940): 24 –25, 50 –54. 14. See also Irving Rusinow, “Spanish Americans of New Mexico: A Photographic Record of the Santa Cruz Valley,” Survey Graphic 27 (February 1938): 95 –99; and Allan G. Harper, Andrew Córdova, and Kalvero Oberg, Man and Resources in the Rio Grande Valley (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1943). 15. Joseph V. Metzgar, “The Ethnic Sensitivity of Spanish New Mexicans: A Survey and Analysis,” NMHR 49 (January 1974): 49 –73. Metzgar surveyed 229 Spanish-speaking residents of Albuquerque. “Teaching Racism or History?” SFNM, August 3, 1997. 16. See, for example, William deBuys, “Style vs. Substance,” SFNM, May 22, 1994; and Chris Wilson, The Myth of Santa Fe: Creating a Modern Regional Tradition (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1997), 298 –304. 17. Statement of the father of Marcos Tapia, the 1990 Vargas, in Jeannette DeBouzck and Diane Reyner, Gathering Up Again: Fiesta in Santa Fe (Santa Fe: Quotidian Film Productions, 1992). “Changes in Fiestas to Encourage Indians,” Albuquerque Journal, July 14, 1992. 18. Quoted in the New York Times, February 9, 1998. 19. T. M. Pearce and Telfair Hendon, eds., America in the Southwest: A Regional Anthology (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1933), xxi. 20. “Colonial Arts of New Mexico,” New York Times, October 22, 1928. 21. Joseph Krumgold, And Now Miguel (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Information Agency, 1953), film. Claire Morrill, A Taos Mosaic: Portrait of a New Mexico Village (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1973), 148 – 49. 22. Paul A. F. Walter, Jr., “The Spanish-speaking Community in New Mexico,” Sociology and Social Research 24 (November–December 1939): 151–52. Margaret Mead, Cultural Patterns and Technical Change (Paris: UNESCO, 1953), 168 –79. For a critical look at these and comparable studies, see Charles Briggs, “‘Our Strength Is the Land’: The Structure of Hierarchy and Equality and the Pragmatics of Discourse in Hispano (‘Spanish-American’) ‘Talk about the Past’” (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1981), 34 –59.

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United States on the Indians of the Southwest, 1533– 1960. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1962. Stanley, Norman. No Little Plans: The Story of the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce. N.p., 1956. Starr, Kevin. Inventing the Dream: California through the Progressive Era. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. Steele, Thomas J. Santos and Saints: The Religious Folk Art of Hispanic New Mexico. Santa Fe: Ancient City Press, 1994. Stineman, Esther Lanigan. Mary Austin: Song of a Maverick. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1989. Stocking, George W., Jr. “The Ethnographic Sensibility of the 1920s and the Dualism of the Anthropological Tradition.” In Romantic Motives: Essays on Anthropological Sensibility, edited by George W. Stocking, Jr., 208 –76. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989. ———. “The Santa Fe Style in American Anthropology: Regional Interest, Academic Initiative, and Philanthropic Policy in the First Two Decades of the Laboratory of Anthropology, Inc.” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 18 (January 1982): 3 –19. Sunseri, Alvin. Seeds of Discord: New Mexico in the Aftermath of the American Conquest, 1846 – 1861. Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1979. ———. “Sheep Ricos, Sheep Fortunes in the Aftermath of the American Conquest, 1846 –1861.” El Palacio 83 (Spring 1977): 3 –8. Susman, Warren. Culture and Commitment, 1929– 1945. New York: G. Braziller, 1973. Swadesh, Frances Leon. “The Social and Philosophical Context of Creativity in Hispanic New Mexico.” Rocky Mountain Social Science Journal 9 (January 1972): 11–18. ———. “Structure of Hispanic-Indian Relations in New Mexico.” In The Survival of Spanish American Villages, edited by Paul Kutsche, 53 –62. Colorado College Studies, no. 15. Colorado Springs, Colo.: Colorado College, 1979. Takaki, Ronald. Iron Cages: Race and Culture in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: Knopf, 1977. Taylor, William B. “Patrón Leadership at the Crossroads: Southern Colorado in the Late Nineteenth Century.” In The Chicano, edited by Norris Hundley, Jr., 73 –95. Santa Barbara, Calif.: Clio Books, 1975. Thomas, D. H. The Southwestern Indian Detours. Phoenix, Ariz.: Hunter Publishing, 1978. Thomas, David Hurst. “Harvesting Ramona’s Garden: Life in California’s Mythical Mission Past.” In Columbian Consequences, vol. 1: The Spanish Borderlands in Pan-American Perspective, edited by David Hurst Thomas, 119 – 57. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991. Thompson, John B., ed.. Language and Symbolic Power. Cambridge: Basil Blackwell, 1991. Tjarks, Alicia V. “Demographic, Ethnic and Occupational Structure of New Mexico, 1790.” The Americas 35 (July 1978): 45 –88.

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Tobias, Henry J. A History of the Jews in New Mexico. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1990. Toews, John E. “Intellectual History after the Linguistic Turn: The Autonomy of Meaning and Irreducibility of Experience.” American Historical Review 92 (October 1987): 879 –907. Torgovnick, Mariana. Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990. Tórrez, Robert J. “‘El Bornes’: La Tierra Amarilla and T. D. Burns.” New Mexico Historical Review 56 (April 1981): 161–75. Townsend, Kim. Manhood at Harvard: William James and Others. New York: Norton, 1996. Trachtenberg, Alan. Brooklyn Bridge: Fact and Symbol. New York: Oxford University Press, 1965. ———. “Myth and Symbol.” Massachusetts Review 25 (Winter 1984): 667–73. Trennert, Robert A. “Fairs, Expositions, and the Changing Image of Southwestern Indians, 1876 –1904.” New Mexico Historical Review 62 (April 1987): 127–50. Trulio, Beverly. “Anglo-American Attitudes toward New Mexican Women.” Journal of the West 12 (April 1973): 229 –39. Twitchell, Ralph Emerson. Old Santa Fe: The Story of New Mexico’s Ancient Capital. 1925; Chicago: Rio Grande Press, 1963. Tydeman, William E. “A New Deal for Tourists: Route 66 and the Promotion of New Mexico.” New Mexico Historical Review 69 (April 1991): 203 –15. Van Ness, John R. “Hispanic Land Grants: Ecology and Subsistence in the Uplands of Northern New Mexico and Southern Colorado.” In Land, Water, and Culture: New Perspectives on Hispanic Land Grants, edited by Charles L. Briggs and John R. Van Ness, 141–214. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1987. ———. “Hispanic Village Organization in Northern New Mexico: Corporate Community Structure in Historical and Comparative Perspective.” In The Survival of Spanish American Villages, edited by Paul Kutsche, 21– 44. Colorado College Studies, no. 15. Colorado Springs, Colo.: Colorado College, 1979. Vigil, Arnold. “Weathering the Times: 70 Years and Stronger than Ever.” New Mexico 70 (July 1992): 17–22. Wade, Edwin L. “The Ethnic Art Market in the American Southwest, 1880 – 1980.” In Objects and Others: Essays on Museums and Material Culture, edited by George W. Stocking, Jr., 167–91. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985. Walker, Franklin. A Literary History of Southern California. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1950. Walter, Paul A. F. “Octaviano Ambrosio Larrazolo.” New Mexico Historical Review 7 (April 1932): 97–104. Walters, Ronald G. “Signs of the Times: Clifford Geertz and the Historians.” Social Research 47 (Autumn 1980): 537–56.

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Weber, David J. “Here Rests Juan Espinosa: Toward a Clearer Look at the Image of the ‘Indolent’ Californios.” Western Historical Quarterly 10 (January 1979): 61–68. ———. The Mexican Frontier, 1821– 1846: The American Southwest under Mexico. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1982. ———. “‘Scarce More than Apes’: Historical Roots of Anglo-American Stereotypes of Mexicans in the Border Region.” In New Spain’s Far Northern Frontier: Essays on Spain in the American West, 1540– 1821, edited by David J. Weber, 293 –307. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1979. ———. The Spanish Frontier in North America. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1992. ———. “Turner, the Boltonians, and the Borderlands.” In Myth and History of the Hispanic Southwest, edited by David J. Weber, 22 – 44. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1988. Weigle, Marta. “A Brief History of the Spanish Colonial Arts Society.” In Spanish New Mexico. Vol. 2: Hispanic Arts in the Twentieth Century, edited by Donna Pierce and Marta Weigle, 26 –35. Santa Fe: Museum of New Mexico Press, 1996. ———. Brothers of Light, Brothers of Blood: The Penitentes of the Southwest. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1976. ———. “Exposition and Mediation: Mary Colter, Erna Fergusson, and the Santa Fe/Harvey Popularization of the Native Southwest, 1902 –1940.” Frontiers 12, no. 3 (1992): 117–50. ———. “The First Twenty-five Years of the Spanish Colonial Arts Society.” In Hispanic Arts and Ethnohistory in the Southwest: New Papers Inspired by the Work of E. Boyd, edited by Marta Weigle, 181–203. Santa Fe: Ancient City Press, 1983. ———. “From Desert to Disney World: The Santa Fe Railway and the Fred Harvey Company Display the Indian Southwest.” Journal of Anthropological Research 45 (Spring 1989): 115 –37. ———. New Mexicans in Cameo and Camera: New Deal Documentation of Twentieth-Century Lives. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1985. ———. “On Coyotes and Crosses: That Which Is Wild and Wooden of the Twentieth-Century Southwest.” In Essays on the Changing Images of the Southwest, edited by Richard Francaviglia and David Narrett, 72 –104. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1994. ———. “The Penitente Brotherhood in Southwestern Fiction: Notes on Folklife and Literature.” In The American Self: Myth, Ideology, and Popular Culture, edited by Sam B. Girgus, 221–30. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1981. ———. “Publishing in Santa Fe, 1915 – 40.” El Palacio 90 (annual issue, 1984): 11–19. ———. “Southwest Lures: Innocents Detoured, Incensed Determined.” Journal of the Southwest 32 (Winter 1990): 499 –539.

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Weigle, Marta, comp. A Penitente Bibliography. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1976. Weigle, Marta, and Kyle Fiore. Santa Fe and Taos: The Writer’s Era, 1916 – 1941. Santa Fe: Ancient City Press, 1982. Weigle, Marta, and Donna Pierce, eds. Spanish New Mexico. Vol. 1: The Arts of Spanish New Mexico. Santa Fe: Museum of New Mexico Press, 1996. Weigle, Marta, and Peter White. The Lore of New Mexico. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1988. Weitze, Karen J. California’s Mission Revival. Los Angeles: Hennessey & Ingalls, 1984. Westphall, Victor. Mercedes Reales: Hispanic Land Grants of the Upper Rio Grande Region. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1983. Whaley, Charlotte. Nina Otero-Warren of Santa Fe. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1994. Whisnant, David. All That Is Native and Fine: The Politics of Culture in an American Region. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983. White, Richard. “It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own”: A New History of the American West. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991. ———. “Race Relations in the American West.” American Quarterly 38 (1986): 396 – 416. White, Robert Rankin. “Felix Martinez: A Borderlands Success Story.” El Palacio 87 (Winter 1981): 13 –17. Williams, Raymond. Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977. Wilson, Chris. The Myth of Santa Fe: Creating a Modern Regional Tradition. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1997. ———. “New Mexico in the Tradition of Romantic Reaction.” In Pueblo Style and Regional Architecture, edited by Nicholas C. Markovich, Wolfgang F. E. Preiser, and Fred G. Sturm, 175 –94. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1990. Wilson, Christopher. “The Spanish Pueblo Revival Defined, 1904 –1921.” New Mexico Studies in the Fine Arts 7 (1982): 24 –30. Wilson, William H. The City Beautiful Movement. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989. Wroth, William. “The Flowering and Decline of the New Mexican Santero: 1780 –1900.” In New Spain’s Far Northern Frontier: Essays on Spain in the American West, 1540– 1821, edited by David J. Weber, 275 –82. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1979. ———. “The Hispanic Craft Revival in New Mexico.” In Revivals! Diverse Traditions, 1920- 1945, edited by Janet Kardon, 84 –93. New York: American Craft Museum, 1994. ———. “Introduction: Hispanic Southwestern Craft Traditions in the Twentieth Century.” In Hispanic Crafts of the Southwest, edited by William Wroth, 1–8. Colorado Springs, Colo.: Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, 1977. ———. “Jewelry in Spanish New Mexico: Some Thoughts on the Arts of the

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Platero.” In Hispanic Crafts of the Southwest, edited by William Wroth, 63 – 68. Colorado Springs, Colo.: Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, 1977. ———. “New Hope in Hard Times: Hispanic Crafts Are Revived during Troubled Years.” El Palacio 89 (Summer 1983): 23 –31. Zeleny, Carolyn. Relations between Spanish-Americans and Anglo-Americans of New Mexico. New York: Arno Press, 1974.

Dissertations and Theses Apodoca, Anacleto G. “The Hispano Farmers’ Conception of the Federal Agricultural Services in the Tewa Basin of New Mexico.” Ph.D. diss., Cornell University, 1951. Arellano, Anselmo. “Through Thick and Thin: Evolutionary Transitions of Las Vegas Grandes and Its Pobladores.” Ph.D. diss., University of New Mexico, 1990. Bernstein, Bruce David. “The Marketing of Culture: Pottery and Santa Fe’s Indian Market.” Ph.D. diss, University of New Mexico, 1993. Briggs, Charles. “‘Our Strength Is the Land’: The Structure of Hierarchy and Equality and the Pragmatics of Discourse in Hispano (‘Spanish-American’) ‘Talk About the Past.’” Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1981. Bustamante, Adrian. “Los Hispanos: Ethnicity and Social Change in New Mexico.” Ph.D. diss., University of New Mexico, 1982. Gaither, James Mann. “A Return to the Village: A Study of Santa Fe and Taos, New Mexico, as Cultural Centers, 1900 –1934.” Ph.D. diss., University of Minnesota, 1957. Gillespie, Andrea Claire. “Sign and Signifier in Santa Fe: The History of a Clothing Style.” Ph.D. diss, University of New Mexico, 1995. Kenneson, Susan R. “Through the Looking Glass: A History of Anglo-American Attitudes toward the Spanish-Americans and Indians of New Mexico.” Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1978. Kropp, Phoebe S. “‘All Our Yesterdays’: The Spanish Fantasy Past and the Politics of Public Memory in Southern California, 1884 –1939.” Ph.D. diss., University of California, San Diego, 1999. Lehmann, Terry Jon. “Santa Fe and Albuquerque, 1870 –1900: Contrast and Conflict in the Development of Two Southwestern Towns.” Ph. D. diss, University of Indiana, 1974. Montoya, Maria E. “Dispossessed People: Settler Resistance on the Maxwell Land Grant, 1860 –1901.” Ph.D. diss, Yale University, 1993. Nieto-Phillips, John Michael. “‘No Other Blood’: History, Language, and Spanish American Ethnic Identity in New Mexico, 1880s–1920s.” Ph.D. diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 1997. Reichard, David A. “‘Justice Is God’s Law’: The Struggle to Control Social Conflict and U.S. Colonization of New Mexico, 1846 –1912.” Ph.D. diss., Temple University, 1996.

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Saxton, Russell S. “Ethnocentrism in the Historical Literature of Territorial New Mexico.” Ph.D. diss., University of New Mexico, 1980. Severns, Mary Irene. “Tourism in New Mexico: The Promotional Activities of the New Mexico State Tourist Bureau, 1935 –1950.” Master’s thesis, University of New Mexico, 1951. Smedshammer, Michael Oren. “Modern Writers in New Mexico: Charles Lummis, Oliver La Farge, D. H. Lawrence, Willa Cather, and the Quest for Purpose and Place in the Southwest.” Ph.D. diss., University of New Mexico, 1998. Traugott, Joseph D. “Inventing, Authenticating, and Promoting a Mythic View of the American Southwest: Charles F. Lummis’s Photographs, 1888 – 1988.” Ph.D. diss., University of New Mexico, 1888 –98. Weitze, Karen J. “Origins and Early Development of the Mission Revival in California.” Ph.D. diss., Stanford University, 1978. Wilson, Christopher. “The Santa Fe, New Mexico Plaza: An Architectural and Cultural History.” Master’s thesis, University of New Mexico, 1981.

Oral History East Mountain Oral History Project, Center for Southwest Research. Las Vegas Oral Histories, Carnegie Public Library, Las Vegas, New Mexico North Valley Oral History Project, Center for Southwest Research. Ortiz y Pino de Kleven, Concha. Recorded interview of August 21, 1975, and July 7, 1986, Concha Ortiz y Pino de Kleven Papers, Center for Southwest Research. Thomas, Anita Gonzales. Recorded interview of November 28, 1984, Vivan Las Fiestas Collection, Museum of International Folk Art, Santa Fe.

Films DeBouzck, Jeannette, and Diane Reyner. Gathering Up Again: Fiesta in Santa Fe. VHS, 47 min. Santa Fe: Quotidian Film Productions, 1992. Krumgold, Joseph. And Now Miguel. 16 mm, 63 min. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Information Agency, 1953.

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Index

Abeyta, Bernardo, 175 Abiquiu, 211, 213 Acoma Pueblo, mission church of, 90, 111, 115, 123; Oñate’s attack on, 225 Alarid, J. M. H., 73 Albuquerque, 40, 105, 132, 160, 180, 197; railroad’s impact on, 44, 94, 107–8 Albuquerque Journal, 163 Alianza Hispano-Americana, 135, 150, 222, 253n36 Alvarado Hotel (Albuquerque), 106 –17, 117, 139 Amador, Martínez, 74 Anderson, A. B., 178 And Now Miguel, 227 Anglo society: appropriation of Spanish symbols by, 87–88, 92 –93, 127; artists and writers, 2, 141, 191; ethnic diversity, 8, 43; expansion in New Mexico, 7–11, 21–22, 39 – 40, 43 – 47, 54 –55, 61, 223; expansion in Southwest, 10; limits to power of, 22, 39 – 40; regional variation of, 233n10; role in Spanish revival, 16 –17, 221–22, 226 – 29. See also literature; racial accommodation; Spanish revival Applegate, Frank, 2, 171, 173, 181–82, 211; Spanish craftsmanship and, 167–71, 175 –76, 179 –80 Aragon, Florencio, 46 Archaeological Institute of America, 89, 114

architecture: adobe, 91, 110 –11; American character of, 124 –25; Anglo-Hispano conflict and, 92, 113 –16; California mission styles, 103 – 4, 106, 111, 261n32; City Beautiful movement, 90 –91, 109; Edgar Hewett and, 90; pueblo style, 92; railroad buildings, 106 –7; Santa Fe Style, 98, 110 –12, 115, 119, 124, 224; social function of, 90, 258n5; Victorian, 90 –91. See also Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad; Franciscan missionaries; expositions, Panama-California; Palace of the Governors; Santa Fe; tourism Archuleta, Diego, 42 Armijo, George Washington, 135 –36, 139 Armijo, Juan Cristobal, 42 Armijo, Luis, 54, 85 Armijo, Manuel, 37, 39, 41 Armijo, Theodore Roosevelt (son of G. W. Armijo), 135 artists. See Anglo society, artists and writers; Spanish colonial arts Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad (later Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railway), xii, 62, 93, 104, 146; impact of 1880 arrival, 44; Los Angeles and, 99; Panama-California Exposition, 117; welcome ceremony in Santa Fe, 54 –55. See also architecture; tourism Austin, Mary, 2 – 4, 14, 19, 100, 141, 143, 145, 181–82, 281n56; Aurelio Espinosa

327

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328

INDEX

Austin, Mary (continued) and, 206, 279n40; Culture Center and, 146 – 47, 149 –50; literature and, 191–92, 199, 203, 211; Spanish colonial arts and, 167, 171, 173, 175, 179 – 80 authenticity, 2, 124, 138, 163, 189, 219 Auxiliar Feminil, 151, 153 Aztlán. See Pueblo Indians Aztlán (journal), 96 Baca, Bartólome, 47 Baca, James, 84 Baca, Jesús, 153 Baca, Roman L., 135 Barela, Casimiro, 65 Barela, Patrocino, 175, 185 Barela, Sofía, 65 Barker, Ruth Laughlin, 146, 172, 198; Caballeros, 198 –99 Barker, S. Omar, 199 Barreiro, Antonio, 40 Baumann, Gustave, 138, 141 Beard, Charles, 170 Becknell, William, 34, 243n34 Belen, 7 Benavides, Tomasita, 31 Benedict, Ruth, 147– 48 Bent, Charles, 42 Beveridge, Albert, 74 –75 Black Legend, 61–62 blood, purity of, 3, 21, 78, 81, 196, 222. See also Limpieza de sangre Bloom, Lansing Bartlett, 137, 264n58 Boas, Franz, 147, 265n67 Bogardus, Emory, 202 El Boletín Popular (Santa Fe), 70 –71 Bolton, Herbert Eugene, 264n58 Bond, Frank, 162 Botkin, B. A., 199, 200, 202, 204 Bourbon reforms, 28 Box, John C., 193 Bradford, W. C., 270n35 Brewster, Mela Sedillo, 180, 182 Bright, Robert, 211 Brown, Lorin, 205, 207 Burke, Charles, 137 Bursum Bill, 137, 140, 212 Bursum, Holm, 80, 82 –85, 137 Bustos, Luis, 46, 210 Butler, Benjamin, 71 Bynner, Witter, 141– 42, 146, 199, 212

C. de Baca, Ezéquiel, 65, 77, 80 –81, 89, 120, 126, 222; election of 1916, 83; constituent letters , 86 C. de Baca, Manuel, 69, 72 C. de Baca, Thomas, 54 Cabrillo, Juan Rodrígez, 48, 118 California: Anglo conquest of, 39, 49 –52, 63 –64; economic development of, 99 –100; population change, 51–52; San Gabriel Mission Play, 134; Spanish colonization of, 48 – 49; Spanish revival in, 14 –15, 63 –64, 97–104; stratification of Spanish-speaking society, 63 –64. See also architecture; tourism Calvin, Ross, 199 Campa, Arthur, 159, 185 –86, 202 –3, 222 – 23 Candelaria, José, 165 Carnegie Foundation, 173 Carson, Kit, 41 Carter, P. E., 85 Cartwright, Samuel, 136 Casino Hispano-Americana, 253n36 Cassidy, Gerald, 141, 172 Cassidy, Ina Sizer, 145 casta system, 27–28 Cather, Willa, xi, 191; Death Comes for the Archbishop,194 –96 Catholic (Colorado), 70 –71 Catholicism, 64 –65, 98, 195, 209; communal ties and, 132 –33; Hispano settlers and, 29 –32; Santa Fe Fiesta and, 130 – 33; village saints’ days, 32, 131–32. See also tourism Catron, Thomas B., 73, 80, 83; land losses, 46 – 47; opposition to Santa Fe Style, 112 Centro de Cultura, 149, 154 Chacón, Eusebio, 64, 69, 71, 113, 126 Chacón family, 65 Chacón Medina Salazar y Villaseñor, José, 131 Channing, Grace Ellery, 99 Chapman, Kenneth, 2, 172, 174 Chase, Stuart, 171 Chaves, Amado (son of Manuel), 101, 122 Chaves, Ireneo (son of Manuel), 101, 122, 210 Chaves, José Felipe (El Millonario), 52 Chaves, J. Francisco, 39, 51–53, 108, 135 Chaves, Manuel, 101, 210

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INDEX

Chávez, Dennis, 144, 191, 222, 223 Chávez, E. V., 122 Chávez, Eddie, 132 Chavez, Fray Angelico, 191, 211 Chávez, José (brother of Mariano), 35 Chávez, Mariano (father of J. Francisco), 35, 37, 39, 52 Chávez, Miguel, 227–28 Chicago Tribune, 75 Chilili, 209 Chimayo: blankets, 185; earnings of craftsman in, 186; Santuario, 175 –76, 280n47 Chisum, John S., 43 Chupadero, 185 ciboleros, 44 Cincinnati Commercial, 75 City Beautiful movement, 90 –91, 109 “civilization”: architecture and, 112, 124 – 25; European roots of, 3, 76, 95, 124, 195, 220 –21; paisanos and, 121, 140; primitive conditions and, 90 –92, 120 –21. See also Franciscan missionaries; Walter, Paul A. F. Civil War, 41 class divisions. See wealth, divisions of; social status Cleveland, Grover, 252n32 Club Industrial, 154 Cochiti, 5 Collier, David C., 109 Collier’s, 218 commerce: Anglo, 29, 40 – 41, 43 – 44; Chihauhau merchants and, 29, 33 – 34; during colonial period, 26 –27, 28 –29, 33 –34; Hispano merchant class (comerciantes), 35, 36, 40, 43; on Santa Fe Trail-Camino Real, 29, 34, 40, 94; sheep, 34 –35, 244n43; and social divisions in Mexican period, 35 –39. See also Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railroad Committee on Spanish-American Affairs, 214 –15 Congreso del Pueblo de Habla Español (Congress of Spanish-speaking people), 203, 286n24 Connelly, Henry, 41 La Conquistadora, 32, 33, 131; reconquest observance and, 133 Conquistadors: glorification of, 64, 82, 102, 123; masculinity of, 17–18, 72,

329

87, 102, 113, 154, 219; Max Luna as embodiment of, 77–78; Palace of the Governors and, 116; New Mexico Museum of Fine Arts and, 125; split nominating ticket and, 86, 88 Conway, John, 178 Corbin, Alice. See Henderson, Alice Corbin Córdova, Nadine, 224 Córdova, Patsy, 224 Coronado, Francisco Vásquez de, 217–21 Coronado Cuarto Centennial Celebration, 217–23, 228 Coronado Entrada, 218 Coronel, Antonio, 99 Corpus Christi processions, 132 –33 Cortez Palace, 115 Court of Private Land Claims. See federal government Crichton, Kyle, 203 – 4, 213 Cross of the Martyrs: dedication of, 128; procession to, 151 Culture Center of the Southwest, 145, 145 –50, 213; paisanos and, 149 Curtain, Leonara, 172, 180 Cutting, Bronson, 143 – 44, 190 –91; homosexuality of, 271n42; paisanos and, 144; Spanish arts and, 172, 178 –79, 181 Dallas, 177 Dasburg, Andrew, 172 Davey, Randall, 141 Davis, Katherine, 250n16 Davis, W. W. H., 62, 75, 249n14 DeHuff, Elizabeth, 208 DeHuff, John, 137 del Valle, Reginaldo, 51, 99 del Valle, Ygnacio, 51 Democrat Advance (Socorro), 55 Democratic Party, 8, 75, 79 –86 Denver News, 78 de Vargas, Don Diego. See Vargas, Don Diego de De Vargas Pageant, 133 –36, 269n21 Díaz, Porfirio, 122, 193 Díaz, Rafaelo, 144 Dietrich, Margretta, 172 Dobie, J. Frank, 199 –200 Dollard, John, 201 Domínguez, Atanasio, 27

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INDEX

Don Simón, 172 Doña Ana County, 74 Economic development: hindrances to, 93, 190; “race issue” and, 68 –69; taxation and, 255n65. See also commerce; Spanish colonial New Mexico; tourism education, 73, 177–78, 180 –81, 186; training in “Spanish” arts, 177–81 Elkins, Stephen, 73 El Llano de San Juan, 31 El Paso, 23, 81 Encomienda, 24 –25 English, use of, 21, 121 Escabosa, 132, 209 Escobar, José, 113 Español. See social status Espinosa, Aurelio, 182, 206 –7, 279n40 Espinosa, Carmen, 182 Espinosa, Gertrude, 270n35 Espinosa, Gilberto, 182, 222 Estancia Grant, 47– 48 ethnoracial labels: xii, 3, 57–58, 60 –61, 69, 248n7; in scholarship, 232n2; in twentieth century, 86, 173, 224. See also “Mexican” label; “SpanishAmerican” label Evans, J. T., 85 expositions: Columbian (Chicago, 1893), 104; Louisiana Purchase (St. Louis, 1904), 105 –7; Panama-California (San Diego, 1915), 116 –20; PanAmerican (Buffalo, 1901), 103. See also; Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad; tourism Fall, Albert B., 80, 82, 86, 122 –23, 137 “fantasy heritage,” 15 –16 federal government: conquest and annexation of New Mexico, 41– 42; Coronado Cuarto Centennial and, 219; Court of Private Land Claims, 46 – 47; Good Neighbor program, 219; land grants and, 45 – 48; land ownership and, 164 –65; relief during 1930s, 160, 166 –67, 219~;; Writers’ Project, 46, 205 –6, 210 –11, 240n2 Fergusson, Erna (daughter of Harvey B. Fergusson), 220, 275n6 Fergusson, Harvey (son of Harvey B. Fergusson), 191; Blood of the Conquerors, 196 –97; Rio Grande, 197

Fergusson, Harvey B., 80, 83, 196 Fletcher, John Gould, 201 Ficke, Arthur Davidson, 212 fiesta. See Santa Fe Fiesta Fiske, Eugene, 113 folk dramas. See paisanos, folkways of Ford, Henry, 170 Franciscan missionaries, 24, 97, 105; as bearers of civilization, 92, 106, 113, 119 –20, 125 –26, 154; and civilization in California, 15, 97, 103, 104; Charles Lummis and, 101– 4; manliness and, 17–18, 101– 4, 106, 113, 120; as symbols for modern-day Anglos, 92, 106. See also Alvarado Hotel; tourism Frank, Waldo, 171 Fred Harvey Company. See tourism, Fred Harvey Company Frost, Max, 105 Frost, Robert, 212 Gallegos, Celso, 173, 175, 189 Gamio, Manuel, 194, 202 García, Encarnación, 173 García, Felix, 84 García, Juan, 173 Gathering Up Again, 267n2 Geertz, Clifford, 12 gender, 17–18. See also conquistadors, masculinity of; Franciscan missionaries, manliness and; Lummis, Charles; paisanos, imagined femininity and; Santa Fe Fiesta, women and femininity; Spanish colonial arts, feminine domesticity and; Spanish heritage, gender distinctions and Genízaros, 27 Gerould, Katharine Fullerton, 1– 4, 16, 19, 203 Gilbert, Fabiola Cabeza de Vaca, 222 “Golden Image,” 250n19 Goodhue, Bertram, 118 Goodnight, Charles, 43 Gonzales, Henry, 182 Gonzales, José Angel, 37 gorras blancas, 71–72; Ezéquial C. de Baca and, 83 Grant, Ulysses S., 59 Gwin, William, 50 Harper’s, 1–2, 148 Harrison, Benjamin, 253n39 Harte, Bret, 99

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INDEX

Hartley, Marsden, 141 Hayes, Rutherford B., 93 Hemet, Calif., 98 Henderson, Alice Corbin, 2, 141, 164, 172, 199; background of, 212; medievalism and, 164, 211, 213 –14; Brothers of Light, 213 –14; Red Earth, 212 Henderson, William Penhallow, 141, 213 Henri, Robert, 141 heritage, 11–12. See also Spanish heritage Hernández, B. C., 82 Herrera, Agapito de, 151 Hewett, Edgar Lee, 89, 190; architectural initiatives, 120 –21, 125, 127; background of, 114; Culture Center debate, 145 – 47, 150; School of American Archaeology (later School of American Research), 114; feud with Cutting, 144, 265n67; Palace of the Governors project, 116; PanamaCalifornia Exposition, 117; “race betterment,” 117, 122; Santa Fe Fiesta, 129, 140 – 41 Hickey, Ethel, 275n6 Higgins, Victor, 138 Hinkle, James F., 211 “Hispanic New Deal.” See federal government Hispanoamericano (Hispano-Americano). See “Spanish-American” label Hispano society: civil rights, 79 –80, 252n32; composition of, 8, 234n16; customs, 20; divisions within, 8 –9, 27–28, 36 –38; establishment and expansion, 5 –9, 23, 25 –29; ethnoracial origins, 8, 15; identification with Mexico, 38 –39, 57–58, 249n9; lore, 204 –8, 221; rise and decline during nineteenth century, 9, 22, 35 –38, 43 – 48, 52 –53, 65 –68. See also Catholicism; Indians, hostilities with Hispanos; marriage; racial division; paisanos; politics; Pueblo Indians, tension with Hispanos; ricos; Spanish colonial New Mexico Horgan, Paul, xi, 199 Hubbell, Francisco, 66 El Independiente, 72, 81 Indian arts, preservation of, 2, 174 Indians, 23, 28, 38, 42; Anglo idealization of, 96, 138 –39, 280n44; in California, 100 –101; enslavement of, 5, 26 –27,

331

31, 43, 131; hostilities with Hispanos, 25, 28, 29, 31, 38, 68, 139 – 40, 239n41; influences on Hispano culture, 5, 112, 124 –25, 168; nomad, 7, 25, 28, 35 –36, 68; “savage,” 5, 27, 31, 113 –14, 123; Tertio-Millennial Exposition and, 94 –96; voting rights, 7. See also expositions; Pueblo Indians; Spanish colonial New Mexico; tourism, Indians and indios bárbaros. See Indians, “savage” infant mortality. See paisanos, privations of Jackson, Helen Hunt, 98 –99, 101 James, George Wharton, 210 Jaramillo, Cleofas (née Martínez), 33, 223; murdered daughter of, 288n38; role in Spanish revival, 21–22; writing of, 207– 08 Jaramillo, María Josefa, 41 Jaramillo, Venceslao (husband of Cleofas), 21–22, 82, 207 Jemez Grant, 46 Jews. See Anglo society, ethnic diversity Johnson, E. Dana, 142, 146 – 47, 175, 211; and Cutting, Bronson, 143 – 44; “Negro Crime” and, 288n38; Santa Fe Fiesta and, 142 – 45, 151, 153 Johnson, Spud, 142 Johnson, William Templeton, 270n26 Jones, Howard Mumford, 200 Jones, W. A. Fleming, 76 José María, 36 Joseph, Antonio, 80 Koshare Tours, 272n6 Krumgold, Joseph, 227 La Farge, Oliver, xi, 137 La Fonda, 112, 139, 270n28 Lamy, Jean-Baptiste, 195 Land grants: disputes during territorial period, 44 – 48; Mexican initiatives, 40 – 41; opportunities for Anglo migrants, 94; Spanish colonial initiatives, 25 –26 “Land of Enchantment,” 219 Land of Sunshine: California, 101, 104; New Mexico, 105 –6 Land of the Pueblos, 96 Lane, George W., 252n32 Larrazolo, Octaviano A., 143, 223; Hispano wariness of, 85; hostility toward

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Larrazolo, Octaviano A. (continued) Indians, 140; native son movement, 81–88; salute to colonial “civilization,” 113 –14 Las Cruces Daily News, 220 Las Placitas, 46, 171 Las Vegas, 68, 71, 81; railroad’s impact on, 44, 94, 107–8, 114 Laughing Horse,142 Lawrence, D. H., xi, 194 Lewis, Sinclair, 147 Liga Obrera de Habla Español, 214 Limpieza de sangre, 8, 27, 222 Lindsey, Vachel, 212 Lindsey, Washington, 123 linguistic turn, 13 literature, 2, 141, 191; agrarian movement, 200 –1; celebration of preindustrial past, 191–92; Hispano accommodation and, 208; medieval imagery, 211– 14; politics and, 191, 202; Popular Front, 192, 202; southwestern regionalism, 192, 199 –204; standardization and, 192, 199 –200, 204; Writers’ Editions, 199 “Little Texas,” 66 Llewelyn, W. W. H., 123 Long, Haniel, 199 López, Celso, 136 López, José Dolores, 168, 173 López, Lorenzo, 71 Los Angeles, 15; Chamber of Commerce, 100, 103; Fiesta, 139; Lummis and, 101–2; population changes, 99; tourism, 91, 99 –101 Los Angeles Times, 101, 104 Los Candelarias, 132 Lucero, Antonio, 65, 77, 80 –81, 205, 223; background, 126; photographic exhibit, 126 –27 Lucero-White, Aurora, 205 –6, 208 Luhan, Mabel Dodge, 138, 191 Luján, Antonio, 138 Luján, Cipriano, 87 Luján, Juana, 26 Lummis, Charles F., xi, 113, 118; gender distinctions and, 101– 4; Penitentes and, 210 Luna, Antonio, 168 Luna, Eloisa (sister of Solmon and Tranquilino), 48 Luna, Maximiliano, 77–78, 135

Luna, Solomon, 52, 76 –77, 80, 83, 183 Luna, Tranquilino, 77, 183 lynching, 50, 55 McCormick, Cyrus, Jr., 158, 166 –67, 172, 176, 181, 188; aesthetic demands of, 281n49 McDonald, Gov. William, 83, 122 McFie, John R., 114, 123 McGroarty, John S., 118, 134 McGuiness, John H., 199 machine metaphor, 12, 14, 157, 161; arts and crafts movement, 278n32; Edward Sapir and, 147– 48, 170; Federal Writers’ Project, 205; manual arts, 168, 170 –73, 181, 184 –87, 189; literature, 190, 198 –200, 205, 214, 216; mass culture and, 200; regionalism and, 201, 204 McKinley, William, 70 McWilliams, Carey, 15, 202, 215; Factories in the Fields, 202 mail order, 158, 159, 171, 178, 180 “Main Street,” 147–50 Manzanares, Anastasio, 87 marriage: Hispano-Catholic tradition and, 20 –21; of Hispanos and Anglos, 9, 10, 41 Martínez, Antonio José, 125, 195 Martínez, Cleofas. See Jaramillo, Cleofas Martínez, Felix, 71, 80 –81, 122, 126 Martínez, Julián (father of Cleofas), 21 Martínez, Malaquias, 80 Martínez, Manuel, 20, 209 Martínez, María, 174 Martínez, Reyes (brother of Cleofas), 21, 164, 205, 207 Martínez, Romulo, 120 Martínez, Vicente (grandfather of Cleofas), 21 Mead, Margaret, 147, 228 medieval imagery. See literature, medieval imagery Meechem, Edwin, 138 memory: collective, 14; private, 11–12, 22 – 23. See also Spanish heritage Mexican heritage, 223 “Mexican” image, 1–3, 224, 229; and Anglo virtue, 60; Culture Center and, 150; in literature, 196 –97; and racial difference, 8 –9; in Spanish arts revival, 188; and Spanish heritage, 16,

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218. See also statehood; Mexican immigrants Mexican immigrants: “Mexican” image and, 16, 66 –68, 193 –94, 252n33; cultural influence of, 206 “Mexican” label (including mexicano), 1, 3, 8 –9, 14, 210, 215, 224; and Anglo migrants, 66, 69 –70, 80; “civilized” or “successful” Hispanos, 60 –61; defense of, 71; and shift to “SpanishAmerican,” 56 –57, 86, 215; and Spanish-American War, 77; and Spanish arts, 173 –76, 183, 187 Mexican revolution, 121–23 Mexico. See Hispano society, identification with Mexico; Mexican immigrants; Mexican heritage middlebrow culture, 146 –50 Middle Rio Grande Conservancy, 215 “Middletown,” 148, 187 Mitchell, John S., 103 “Mixed blood,” perceptions of, 62, 65 Milwaukee Sentinel, 62 Mission San Estevan. See Acoma Pueblo, mission church Montezuma, Legend of. See Pueblo Indians Montoya, José Alcario, 137 Moore, Emory, 139 Mora, N. M., 221 Mora, Andrés, 132, 209 Morfi, Juan Agustín de, 31 Morley, Sylvanus, 111–13, 119 –20, 124, 224 Mumford, Lewis, 201 Muñiz, Benigno, 151, 153, 181–82 Museum of Modern Art (New York), 185 Museum of New Mexico, 89, 114, 125, 190; and Culture Center, 145, 150; and Santa Fe Fiesta, 129, 140. See also Culture Center of the Southwest; Hewett, Edgar Lee; New Mexico Musuem of Fine Arts M’Veigh, Warren, 210 myth and symbol approach, 12 National Origins Act, 193 native son movement. See Larrazolo, Octaviano A. Newman Gallery (New York), 176 New Mexico, 163 –64, 218 “New Mexico and the Backwash of Spain,” 1– 4

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New Mexico Association of Indian Affairs, 212 –13 New Mexico Bureau of Immigration, 93 – 94, 96 –97, 105 –6 New Mexico Business Directory, 135 New Mexico Historical Review, 264n58 New Mexico Museum of Fine Arts, 90, 123 –27; and Bolshevist issue, 141 New Mexico Normal School, 114 New Mexico Quarterly, 203 – 4, 207 New Mexico State Department of Vocational Education. See education New Mexico Tourist Bureau, 219 New York (city), 4, 177, 204, 210, 212, 214 New Yorker, 218 New York Evening Post, 74 New York Times, 75, 77, 226 nomenclature. See ethnoracial labels; “Mexican” label; “SpanishAmerican” label Nostrand, Richard, 242n30 Nuestra Señora de los Dolores, 33 Nuestra Señora del Rosario (La Conquistadora), 131 El Nuevo Mexicano, 151, 222 Oberammergau, 134, 145, 211 Odum, Howard, 201 Ohke, 5, 23 Old Guard. See Republican Party Old Santa Fe Association. See Culture Center of the Southwest “Old Spain in New Mexico,” 164, 211 Old Spain in Our Southwest, 158 –59, 184 – 86, 205 Olmsted, Frederick Law, 104 Oñate, Don Juan de, 26; colonizing expedition of, 11, 23, 27, 76, 221, 225; remembrance of, 23, 65 Ordinances of Discovery, 24 Ortega, Nicacio, 168 Ortega y Gassett, 207 Ortiz, Beatrice, 185 Ortiz, Nicolas II, 182 Ortiz, Reynalda, 155 Ortiz y Pino, José, 182 Ortiz y Pino (de Kleven), Concha, 182 – 83; political career, 284n76; social perspective, 183 Oskenonton, 270n5 Otero, Eduardo, 80, 86, 187 Otero, M. S., 46

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Otero, Manual B., 47, 140, 156, 183 Otero, Miguel Antonio, 21, 42, 70, 79, 114, 143, 253n40; Spanish-American War and, 77; statehood and, 74, 76 Otero-Warren, Adelina (Nina), 199, 205 – 6, 208, 223; arts revival and, 158 –61, 172, 178, 182, 185, 187; background, 158, 183; critique of Indians, 140; educational philosophy, 184; Santa Fe Fiesta and, 151, 153, 155 –56; Spanish persona of, 183 –84 Otis, Harrison Gray, 104 Otis, Raymond, 191, 213, 217; Miguel of the Bright Mountain, 214 –16 Page, Frank N., 122 “Pageant of Old Santa Fe,” 150 paisanos, 8 –9, 14; arts revival and, 161; communal pratices of, 38, 132, 171; economic change and, 93, 159 –60, 165 –66, 224; folkways of, 15, 32, 204 – 6, 209; imagined femininity and, 17; importance to Spanish revival, 12, 15 – 17, 227–28; land ownership and, 25, 47, 164 –65; literature and, 192, 197– 98, 203 – 4; modernity and, 159, 171– 72; perceptions of, 61, 159, 172, 198; political role of, 66, 76, 82; privations of, 35 –39, 88, 144, 159 –61, 164 –66; village life and migration of, 161–62, 164, 226. See also expositions, Panama-California; Santa Fe Fiesta; Spanish colonial arts; tourism “Painted Desert.” See expositions, Panama-California Palace of the Governors, 92; neglect of, 115; renovation of, 113 –16 El Palacio, 190, 210; and Santa Fe Fiesta, 137, 139 Park, Robert, 173 Parsons, Sheldon, 138, 141, 172 partidero. See patrón-peon relationship Partido del Pueblo Unido, 71 Pasatiempo. See Santa Fe Fiesta, Pasatiempo patrón-peon relationship, 36, 159, 182 –84, 187, 243n39; folklore and, 207; partidero and, 35 –36, 243n38, 244n40 Patterson Strike Pageant, 142 Pattie, James Ohio, 61 Pearce, Thomas Matthews, 190, 199, 201, 202 – 4, 221

Penitentes, 32 –33, 208 –10, 289n43; Anglo disparagment of, 210; literary portrayals of, 210 –16; Spanish imagery and, 213 –14 Peralta, Vicente, 50 Perea, Dolores, 41 Perea, José Leandro, 36, 41– 42 Pérez, Albino, 37 Perrault, Dolores, 182 Pike, Lt. Zebulon, 34 Piñedo, Encarnacion, 64 Pino, Pedro Bautista, 32, 182, 183 Plymouth, 75, 125 198 Poetry, 212 politics, 191, 253n39; early territorial period, 42; split ticket and, 86, 88; strength of Hispanos, 52, 66. See also Democratic Party; “race issue”; Republican Party Popular Front. See literature, Popular Front population: Anglo versus Hispano, 7–8, 66, 223, 234n12, 292n12; in California, 11, 51–52, 99; colonial period, 28 –29, 242n21; Indian, 5 –7, 240n6; party control and, 80; railroad’s effect on, 44; in Rio Arriba, 162, 274n5; statehood and, 76; territorial period, 40, 65 Portolá, Don Gaspar de, 118 Powell, Lawrence Clark, 194 –95, 227 Prensa Asociada Hispano-Americana, 69 Prince, Leland Bradford, 253n39; dedication of Cross of the Martyrs, 128; dedication of railroad, 54 –55; as historian of Spanish colonial exploits, 113, 116, 126; “Spanish-American” and, 82; statehood and, 75 –76 Pritchard, George W., 76 prohibition, 165 protest rallies. See “race issue” public/private memory. See memory, private; Spanish heritage, public character of Pueblo Indians, 1, 2, 5, 68, 70, 220; adobe architecture and, 112, 124 –25; Anglo relationship with, 96 –97, 124, 148 – 49; Aztlán and, 96; Bursum Bill and, 137, 140, 212; fiesta performances, 129, 136 – 40, 144, 225, 269n25; Montezuma and, 96; Spanish colonization and, 23 –24, 27, 29; tensions with

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Hispanos, 139 – 40, 144, 267n2. See also population, Indian; tourism, Indians Pueblo Revolt, 25, 111, 113, 128 Quintana, Petrita, 172 Quivera Society, 264n58 “race issue,” 56, 78, 115, 121, 123; Anglo concern with, 68 –69; election of 1911, 82; Harvey Fergusson and, 186 – 97; Hispano responses to 64 –72; political parties and, 79 –84. See also Democratic Party; politics; Republican Party, Violence. racial accommodation, 9 –11, 40, 42, 226 – 27; “Spanish-American” and, 86; Santa Fe Fiesta and, 151–52. See also “race issue” racial division: American virtue and, 9; Anglo and Hispano, 7–10, 53, 55, 69, 114 –16, 193 –94, 208, 227–28; construction of, 60 –63, 193, 228 –29; español and indio, 5, 22, 27–28, 33, 57, 66; “Mexican”/ “American” polarity, 9 –10, 58 –60; phenotype and, 9, 155; “progressive” politics and, 69; Spanish revival and, 56; “whiteness” and, 228 –29, 239n40; women and, 251n23. See also “Mexican” image; ethnoracial labels; “Spanish-American” label; statehood railroad. See Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad; Southern Pacific Railroad Ramona, 98 –100 Ramona Pageant, 98 –99 Rancho Camulos, 51, 98 Ransom, John Crowe, 201 Rapp, I. H., 119, 264n54 Read, Benjamin, 113, 158, 264n58 Redfield, Robert, 147– 48 regionalism. See literature, regionalism Republican Party, 8, 21, 70, 75; Edgar Hewett and, 90, 92, 114, 116; Lunas and, 77–78; Old Guard faction of, 79 –84, 88, 93, 105; progressive faction of, 79, 82, 84; racial strategy of, 79 –80; and struggle for state control, 79 –86, 105, 143, 190 Rey, Agapito, 221 ricos, 8 –9, 14, 234n21; and Anglo chal-

335

lenge of nineteenth century, 43 – 44, 47– 48; and Anglo challenge of twentieth century, 155 –56, 158 –59; and español ideal, 57; gains during Mexican period, 35 –38; as intermediaries between Anglo and Hispano society, 155 –56; literature and, 207–8; marriage, 20 –21; photographic exhibition of, 126 –27. See also paisanos; Spanish colonial New Mexico Rio Abajo, 4 –5, 29 –31, 242n21 Rio Arriba, 4 –5, 29 –31; Hispano villages of, 158 –59, 161–66, 186, 224 –26; lore of, 205 –6; political influence of, 81; and rebellion of 1837, 37, 41. See also education; paisanos Rio Grande, upper, 5; settlements of, 28 – 29, 242n24 Ritch, William G., 62, 96, 109 Rockefeller Foundation, 179 Rociada, 209 Rodey, Bernard, 74 –76 Roerich, Nicholai Constantinovitch, 138 Rolshoven, Julius, 138 Romero, Eugenio, 71 Romero, Secundino, 66, 80, 82, 84 Roosevelt, Theodore, 101, 135 Ross, Edmund G., 45 – 46, 96 Rough Riders, 77, 135 Route 66, 219, 222 Rowland, Lea, 181 Ruffner, E. T., 61 Rush, Olive, 141 Saint Francis, 124 St. Louis Globe-Democrat, 78 Salazar, Enrique H., 65, 72, 81, 113 San Antonio, 132 Sánchez, Amalia, 153 Sánchez, George I., 202 –3; Forgotten People, 202, 223 –24 San Clemente Grant, 77 Sandburg, Carl, 212 San Isidro, 132 San Jose Training School, 178 –80, 182, 186 San Luis Valley, Colo., 5 San Mateo, 101, 210 San Miguel County, 71 San Miguel del Vado Grant, 47 Santa Fe: Anglo artists and writers, 4, 141; Anglo and Hispano influence in, 2, 4, 43, 135 –36, 152, 225; business organi-

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Santa Fe (continued) zations, 1–2, 146, 150, 151, 152; capital issue and, 108; design and appearance of, 90, 109 –10; economic stagnation of, 94, 107–8, 262n44; “Negro Crime” in, 288n38; promotional strategies, 108 –9. See also architecture, Santa Fe Style; TertioMillennial Exposition; tourism Santa Fe Fiesta: debate over historical significance, 129; exclusion of Hispanos, 139 – 40; governing council, 140 – 41, 144, 150, 152, 154 –55; Hysterical Parade, 142, 153 –54; Indian amphitheater, 144; modern-day event, 225; opposition to Hewett’s direction, 141– 45; paisanos, 130, 142, 150 – 54, 156 –57; Pasatiempo, 141, 144 – 45; racial unity and division, 152 –53, 156 – 57; ricos, 130, 155 –56; Southwest Indian Fair, 137–38; tourism, 139, 152; “tricultural” character, 129, 136; women and femininity, 154 –55. See Catholicism; Culture Center of the Southwest; Hewett, Edgar; Johnson, E. Dana; Nuestra Señora del Rosario; Pueblo Indians, Spanish folk culture of; Sociedad Folklorica Santa Fe New Mexican (Santa Fe Daily New Mexican), 59, 75, 79, 89, 105, 126, 222; on De Vargas Pagent, 133 – 34; on Santa Fe Fiesta, 128, 142, 151– 52; politics and, 143, 190 Santa Fe Planning Board. See Santa Fe, design and appearance Santa Fe Republican, 60 “Santa Fe Ring,” 73 Santa Fe Trail. See commerce, Santa Fe Trail-Camino Real santos, 32, 167; characteristics of, 169 –70; in village saints’ days, 132 Santuario de Chimayo. See Chimayo Sapir, Edward, 147– 48, 170 Saturday Evening Post, 200, 218 Schenk, C. M., 264n54 School of American Archaeology (later School of American Research). See Museum of New Mexico Sedillo, Antonio, 180 Segura, José, 71 Seligman, Arthur, 109 Seligman, James, 136

Sena, José Jr., 136, 141, 151, 153, 155 –56; ridicule of Pueblo Indians, 140 Sena, José, 156 Sena, Nicholas, 136 Sena, W. T., 221 Sergeant, Elizabeth Shepley, 141, 148 – 49 Serra, Fray Junípero, 99, 118 Sewell, Brice, 180 –83, 185 Sherman, William T., 93 Shuster, Will, 141 siglo del oro, 3, 206 Simpson, William H., 97, 109 Sloan, Dolly, 142 Sloan, John, 2, 141– 42, 153 Smith, Henry Nash, 199 Smith-Hughes Act, 178 Snyder, Nellie, 64 –65 Social status, 26, 155; in California, 64; español ideal and, 5, 22, 27–28, 57; Hispano gentry and, 65, 155 –56, 158 –59; “Spanish culture” and, 150; Spanish heritage and, 17 Sociedad Folklorica, 208, 222 Socorro, 5, 40, 55, 68 Socorro Chieftain, 220 Society for the Preservation of Spanish Antiquities, 116, 126 Southern Pacific Railroad, 99, 104 Southwest Federation of Women’s Clubs, 145, 150 Southwest Review, 199 El Sol de Mayo (Las Vegas), 69, 72 “Spain the Motherland,” 89 –90, 92 –93 “Spanish-American” label (hispanoamericano or Hispano-Americano), 14, 56, 224, 248n6; adoption of, 56 –57, 87, 253n36; Larrazolo and, 81–84, 86; manly courage and, 78; meaning and function of, 57, 68 –71, 87. See also racial accommodation; Republican Party Spanish-American Normal School (El Rito), 178, 184, 222 Spanish-American War, 77–78. See also “race issue”; statehood Spanish colonial arts, 4, 143, 149; Anglo influences on, 169, 181–82; authentic craftsmanship and, 167–68, 170, 174, 176; commercial success of, 185 –86; “decline” and “revival” of, 168 –70; demand for, 176 –77, 184 –85; feminine domesticity and, 188 –89; His-

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pano enthusiasts and, 181–85; Indian art and, 174, 167–69, 184 –85; social function and impact of, 160 –61, 184, 187–89; standardization and, 170 –71, 181, 184, 187. See also education; machine civilization; Spanish Colonial Arts Society Spanish Colonial Arts Society, 2, 172 –78, 181, 185; artistic competitions, 172 – 73, 176; membership, 172 –73, 278n38, 282n62; sales, 176 Spanish colonial New Mexico: commerce with Mexico, 29, 33, 243n33; economic policy affecting, 33 –34; establishment and growth of, 4 –5, 7, 23 – 29, 221, 240n5; Hispano gentry and, 26 –28; scholarship for Coronado Cuarto Centennial, 220. See also Bourbon reforms; casta system; Cathocism; Hispano society Spanish “fantasy heritage,” 15 –16 Spanish folk culture, 3, 14, 159, 203; backwardness and, 156 –57; Culture Center and, 149; femininized image of, 154 – 55, 188 –89, 229; idealized at Santa Fe Fiesta, 129 –30, 143 – 45, 153 –54, 157; political debate over, 156. See also Hispano society, lore; literature, southwetern regionalism; paisanos; Spanish colonial arts Spanish heritage, 224, 226; consequences of, 18 –19, 223 –29; debate over, 32 – 33; definition of, 11–12, 15; depletion of, 218, 224; gender distinctions and, 17–18; linguistic character of, 12 –13, 227; origins of, 15 –17; public character of, 11–14, 238n35; redemption and, 3, 12, 17, 22; social status and, 16; symbols of, 4, 5, 11–13, 22 Spanish language, use of, 21, 77; attack on, 77, 78 –79 Spanish revival: in California, 14 –15, 97– 104; Hispano/Anglo confrontation and, 52 –53; phases of, 17–18; on upper Rio Grande, 12, 15 –16 Spiess, Charles, 80, 84 Springer, Frank, 114; dedication of Museum of Fine Arts, 123, 125 – 26 Stanford University, 104 statehood, 78; “Montezuma,” 96; racial difference and, 72 –78; “Spanish-

337

Americans” and, 76. See also paisanos, population Stevens, Thomas Wood, 150, 220 Sumner, Col. Edwin Vose, 42 suramatos, 68 Survey, 168, 184 symbolism. See myth and symbol approach; Spanish heritage, symbols of Taft, William H., 76, 78 Taos, 7, 21, 40, 141 Taos County, 166, 177, 223 –24 Taos Society of Artists, 271n36 Taos Revolt, 42 Taylor, Carl, 290n49 Taylor, Paul, 202 Taylor, Zachary, 74 Tejada, Simeón, 205 Tejon Grant, 46 Tertio-Millennial Exposition, 94 –97, 133 Texas: aggression of, 41; Anglo conquest of, 10 –11; disparagement of the “Mexican,” 63; Hispano hostility toward, 41, 245n52 Thomas, Anita Gonzales, 152, 153 Thornton, W. T., 71 Tierra Amarilla Grant, 21 Tingley, Clyde, 219, 222 Tireman, Loyd S., 179 –80 tourism, 91, 94, 133; Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad, 97, 107, 162; automobiles and, 217–19; in California, 97–98, 102 – 4, 219; Catholic ceremonies and, 133; economic development and, 63, 109, 218 –19; Fred Harvey Company, 97, 106, 162, 211, 275n6; Hispano villages and, 162 –63; Hopi House, 107; Indians and, 97, 107, 138 –39, 162; Indian Detours, 162 –63; New Mexico’s missions and, 105 –6; opposition to, 142; Penitentes and, 211; role in Spanish revival, 15 – 16; Santa Fe’s strategies of, 109 –11, 138, 225; Spanish arts and, 173 –74, 177, 189. See also Alvarado Hotel; architecture; Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad; Coronado Cuarto Centennial Celebration, De Vargas Pageant; Santa Fe Fiesta Tozzer, Alfred, 265n67 trade. See commerce. Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, 45, 50

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“tri-ethnic” trap, 280n45 Trinidad, Colo., 86 Truchas, 166, 214 Tsianina, 138 Twitchell, Ralph Emerson, 119 Ulibarri, Ismael, 185 Unión Protectiva, 149 –51, 153 United States government. See federal government United States v. Sándoval, 47 University of New Mexico, 179; architecture of, 264n55 Valerium, 171 Vargas, Don Diego de, 25, 27, 32, 108, 113; and “bloodless” request of Santa Fe, 130 –31; entrada of, 133, 151 Vaughn, 224 Valencia County, 77 Vallejo, Guadalupe, 64 Velázquez, 153 Victorian architecture. See architecture, Victorian Vierra, Carlos, 124 –25 villagers. See Paisanos Villeros Alegres, 151 Vigil, Antonio, 39 Vigil, Manuel, 85 Villa, Pancho, 122, 153 violence, 1, 55 –56, 120 –21 Vizcaíno, Sebastián, 48 La Voz del Pueblo (Las Vegas), 71, 77, 83, 85

Wakefield, Charles Cadman, 144 Wallace, Lew, 96, Wallace, Susan, 96 Walter, Paul A. F., 143, 146; ally of Edgar Hewett, 114; background, 105; civilization and, 120 –21; literature and, 190 –91, 216; and Palace of the Governors, 116; and Panama-California Exposition, 119; promotion of Santa Fe, 108 –9 Walter, Paul, Jr., 228 Walton, W. B., 123 Warner, Charles Dudley, 99 wealth: divisions of, 155; racial divisions and, 61–63, 202; Spanish revival and, 16 –17; and structure of New Mexican society, 35 –39, 42. See also commerce Welles, Harriet, 138 Western Liberal (Lordsburg), 108 Wheelwright, Mary Cabot, 172, 174, 181 White, Amelia Elizabeth, 149 Whitman, Walt, 95 Whitney, James, 48 “Why Tourists?” 163 Works Progress Administration. See federal government, Writers’ Project World War II. See Rio Arriba, Hispano villages of Wray, Henry, 123 writers. See Anglo society, artists and writers Wynn, Dudley, 203 Zimmerman, James F., 179, 219 Zug, Robert, 59

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The Spanish Redemption: Heritage, Power, and Loss on New Mexico's Upper Rio Grande

The Rio Grande

Todesgrenze Rio Grande

Rio Grande Wedding

Rio del Norte: people of the Upper Rio Grande from earliest times to the Pueblo revolt

Witchcraft in the Southwest: Spanish and Indian supernaturalism on the Rio Grande

The Pastoral Clinic: Addiction and Dispossession along the Rio Grande

Medieval Culture and the Mexican American Borderlands (Rio Grande Rio Bravo: Borderlands Culture and Traditions, 6)

Mestizo Democracy: The Politics of Crossing Borders (Rio Grande Rio Bravo: Borderlands Culture and Traditions, 8)

Rio

Texas Devils: Rangers and Regulars on the Lower Rio Grande, 1846-1861

Rio

Bloody Valverde: A Civil War Battle on the Rio Grande, February 21, 1862

New Headway upper-Intermediate Tests

On the Spanish Main

On the Spanish Main

Rio

Historia: The Literary Making of Chicana & Chicano History (Rio Grande Rio Bravo: Borderlands Culture and Traditions, 7)

Education, Globalisation and New Times (Education Heritage)

Loss: Sadness And Depression (Attachment and Loss)

Meditations on Living, Dying and Loss

Redemption

Redemption

Redemption

Redemption

Redemption

Redemption

The Spanish Redemption: Heritage, Power, and Loss on New Mexico's Upper Rio Grande

The Rio Grande

Todesgrenze Rio Grande

Rio Grande Wedding

Rio del Norte: people of the Upper Rio Grande from earliest times to the Pueblo revolt

Witchcraft in the Southwest: Spanish and Indian supernaturalism on the Rio Grande

The Pastoral Clinic: Addiction and Dispossession along the Rio Grande

Medieval Culture and the Mexican American Borderlands (Rio Grande Rio Bravo: Borderlands Culture and Traditions, 6)

Mestizo Democracy: The Politics of Crossing Borders (Rio Grande Rio Bravo: Borderlands Culture and Traditions, 8)

Rio

Texas Devils: Rangers and Regulars on the Lower Rio Grande, 1846-1861

Rio

Bloody Valverde: A Civil War Battle on the Rio Grande, February 21, 1862

New Headway upper-Intermediate Tests

On the Spanish Main

On the Spanish Main

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