Category: Excerpt

Steve Pyne on Persevering to Mars

Posted on March 25, 2021March 25, 2021 by Abby Mogollon

March 25, 2021

In a new essay published this week on the History News Network, Steve Pyne explains the link between last months Mars landing by Perseverance and the Great Ages of Discovery, which he details in his new book. Here’s a brief excerpt from the essay:

“There is a lot to marvel at Perseverance’s February 18 landing on Mars, beyond robotic exploration as an extreme sport. Only half of attempted missions to Mars have succeeded, and the sheer technical audacity that stuck Perseverance’s landing is guaranteed to dazzle. But America’s latest endeavor joins two other missions from civilizations re-emerging as global actors after centuries of exploring quietude. Perhaps more deeply, Perseverance’s first-contact photo, a shadow selfie, raises questions about the very nature of discovery and the character of an explorer.”

Excerpt: Strong Hearts and Healing Hands

Posted on March 17, 2021March 17, 2021 by Abby Mogollon

March 17, 2021

In 1924, the United States began a bold program in public health. The Indian Service of the United States hired its first nurses to work among Indians living on reservations. In Strong Hearts and Healing Hands historian Clifford E. Trafzer shows how field nurses and Native people formed a positive working relationship that resulted in the decline of mortality from infectious diseases. With strong hearts, Indians eagerly participated in the tuberculosis campaign of 1939–40 to x-ray tribal members living on twenty-nine reservations. Through their cooperative efforts, Indians and health-care providers decreased deaths, cases, and misery among the tribes of Southern California.

Today, we offer a brief excerpt from the preface of this important new work:

From 1928 to 1948, field nurses served the Indian people of the Mission Indian Agency on every Indian reservation. Their work with the people ultimately led to the decline of morbidity and mortality among tribal people. Field nurses helped improve Indian health, but they did not do it alone. They could not have been successful without the support and cooperation of Native American leaders, families, communities, and tribes. Indian people allowed field nurses, physicians, and hospital employees into their lives. Indians helped health-care providers fight invisible enemies that were then sickening and killing their people. Indians worked in partnership with field nurses to improve the health of their people because, as tribal elders have testified, it was to their advantage to cooperate with field nurses and other health care providers. At the time, Indian people were dying of illnesses brought to Southern California by settlers, soldiers, and government policy makers. Settlers had introduced infectious diseases among the people. Indians reasoned that newcomers had knowledge about the causation and prevention of “traveling” sickness or infectious diseases that moved indiscriminately from person to person, place to place.

During the 1920s, American Indian students had some knowledge about germs and disease prevention from their boarding-school days. When students returned home from Indian schools, they shared public-health knowledge and practical information about unseen enemies attacking their people. For many years, Southern California Indians had lived with bacterial and viral diseases. Indigenous people had their own medical traditions, but the medicine ways of Native Americans generally did not address serious infectious diseases.

For centuries, Native Americans had learned about health and healing from traditional indigenous nurses who lived in every Indian village and community in Southern California. Indigenous women had learned the art of nursing from their elders and their own practical experiences. Indigenous women were experts (and remain so today) in the use of herbal medicines. They used plant medicines to treat symptoms of infectious diseases, but often could not cure disease caused by pathogens. Some shamans claimed the ability to kill infectious diseases caused by microorganisms. Since the time of creation, every tribe had consulted indigenous nurses to help them maintain physical, mental, and spiritual health. Tribal use of Native nurses made it easier for indigenous people to accept treatment and advice from white nurses—all women—working for the Indian Service.

While indigenous nurses expertly used herbal medicines, tribal shamans cured people of staying sickness that existed only within specific tribal communities. However, neither indigenous nurses nor shamans could consistently address new illnesses caused by viruses and bacteria. As a result, and with time, the first people of Southern California agreed to incorporate Western medicine into their own medicine ways. During the early twentieth century, Southern California Indians gradually used Western medicine and integrated new medicine ways into their cultural circles. Once Western medicine proved effective in preventing and curing illnesses, Indians incorporated new medicine into their lives. They slowly brought Western medicine into their own cultural circles and adopted new ways of healing without abandoning their own medicine ways. In essence, Native Americans gradually chose to incorporate Western medicine into their cultures and use it to their advantage. At the same time, they kept their traditional medicine ways. They used both ways to achieve better health. They continued to consult traditional tribal nurses and shamans, drawing on expertise of traditional and new medicine to benefit their people. This form of integrated medicine has continued to this day through community-based and Native-controlled contemporary Indian health centers located throughout Southern California. However, in the 1920s, the Indians of Southern California were just learning about field nurses and important national changes brought to the Indian Service.

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Clifford E. Trafzer is Distinguished Professor of History and Rupert Costo Chair in American Indian Affairs at the University of California, Riverside. Since the 1980s, he has researched the history of Southern California Indians, visiting reservations and learning from their people. He served on the California Native American Heritage Commission, Board of Native American Land Conservancy, and University of California President’s Native American Council.

Excerpt: ‘Rewriting the Chicano Movement’

Posted on January 19, 2021January 15, 2021 by Abby Mogollon

January 19, 2020

In the forthcoming book, Rewriting the Chicano Movement offers an insightful new history of the Chicano Movement that expands the meaning and understanding of this seminal historical period in Chicano history. The essays introduce new individuals and struggles previously omitted from Chicano Movement history. Today we offer a brief excerpt:

From the Introduction
By Mario T. García
The profound changes directly and indirectly attributable to the Chicano Movement have led to increased interest in the history of the Chicano Movement. It is not that historians neglected the movement in the post-movement period of the 1980s and 1990s. However, with some exceptions, historians focused on earlier periods in order to better understand the roots of the Chicano experience. This was understandable given the dearth of research in Chicano history as a whole. Moreover, the immediacy of the movement meant historical perspective was lacking.

As a result of this research, publications on Chicano history as a whole have exploded over the last fifty years. This research includes studies of the Spanish conquest of areas that became part of the United States, such as from Texas to California. Others have focused on the Mexican experience after Mexican independence in 1821 and up to the time the United States forced a war on Mexico and conquered its northern frontier—El Norte. The period following the American conquest of what became the American Southwest has also received attention. However, historians have tended to study the twentieth century more, including mass Mexican immigration to the United States during the first three decades of the century. The Great Depression years have likewise received attention, as has World War II, when thousands of Mexican Americans went to war in support of the United States. Finally, the post–World War II era, especially the 1950s, is also beginning to receive attention. Some pioneering studies on the Chicano Movement also appeared during the last two decades of the twentieth century. These include works by Juan Gómez-Quiñones, Gerald Rosen, Carlos Muñoz, Richard Santillán, Christine Marín, Ignacio García, Ernesto Chávez, and Marguerite Marín. Gómez-Quiñones wrote on the Chicano student movement, as did Carlos Muñoz with a focus on Los Angeles. Gerald Rosen examined the ideology of the movement. One of the best works in this early literature was Ignacio García’s history of La Raza Unida Party. Richard Santillán also focused on La Raza Unida Party. Ernesto Chávez and Marguerite Marín, like Muñoz, focused on Los Angeles as a key location by examining manifestations other than the student movement. Finally, Christine Marín wrote one of the first biographies of Corky Gonzales, a key movement leader in Denver.

These early studies are being significantly augmented in the new millennium. There has emerged a renaissance of Chicano Movement studies. Historians and other scholars, many of them younger professors or graduate students, are rediscovering the Chicano Movement. This new generation seems even more aware of how the movement impacted the lives of many Chicanos and other Latinos in the country. They recognize the movement as a seminal event in the long history of Mexican Americans. While they note that there were earlier civil rights and labor rights struggles, they recognize that the Chicano Movement was unprecedented in its size and impact. The Chicano Movement created the new Chicano and Chicana, and by extension the new Latino and Latina. Contemporary Latino political power is the direct result of the movement.

What distinguishes this new historiography is its focus on the diversity of the movement. Earlier views seemed to suggest that the movement was more monolithic and that the cultural nationalism of the movement was adhered to by most activists. Contemporary historians and other students of the movement see much more diversity in all movement aspects. For example, the movement is being studied in a variety of locations and spaces, not just the main centers of the movement such as California and Texas. Now movement history is being excavated in the Pacific Northwest, New Mexico, Arizona, and the Midwest.

Also, greater attention is being paid to the role of women in the movement and their key contributions. Studies of new locations and different communities reveal how the movement manifested itself regionally and locally and how it was mobilized around community issues pertinent to that locale. In other words, the Chicano Movement was not only a national movement but a local one. Moreover, beginning with Jorge Mariscal’s groundbreaking 2005 book, Brown-Eyed Children of the Sun, some scholars revealed how the cultural nationalism of the movement, Chicanismo, was not monolithic. Other ideological influences such as Third World consciousness, Marxism, and feminism also affected the mindset of Chicano activists, and we saw how the four could be combined. As a result of looking at the Chicano Movement in such a diverse way, this new literature is revisionist and critical. It is a rewriting of the Chicano Movement. This new Chicano Movement history is also impacting our understanding of American history.

***
Mario T. García is Distinguished Professor of Chicano Studies and History at the University of California, Santa Barbara, specializing in Chicano history, Chicano/Latino autobiography, and Chicano/Latino religion. He is the author, co-author, and editor of more than twenty books in Chicano history, including Blowout! Sal Castro and the Chicano Struggle for Educational Justice, The Making of a Mexican American Mayor, and Literature as History. He has won a number of awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship.

A Look Inside A Marriage Out West

Posted on November 23, 2020November 23, 2020 by Savannah Hicks

November 23, 2020

A Marriage Out West is an intimate biographical account of two fascinating figures of twentieth-century archaeology. Frances Theresa Peet Russell, an educator, married Harvard anthropologist Frank Russell in June 1900. They left immediately on a busman’s honeymoon to the Southwest. Their goal was twofold: to travel to an arid environment to quiet Frank’s tuberculosis and to find archaeological sites to support his research.

Below, read an excerpt from Nancy J. Parezo and Don D. Fowler’s A Marriage Out West.

We have long studied how women overcame economic and social barriers as they strove to be successful anthropologists. We have emphasized the hard work, perseverance, and resilience this required, given the asymmetrical reality in what was always considered the most welcoming of the sciences. Anthropology had its limits to the welcome, of course. Interested in the rise of professorships as a form of professional occupation in America, elsewhere we have looked at how anthropological careers compared to those of women who became professionals in the hard sciences, the natural sciences, sociology, and history, but we have never studied someone who pursued a career in English and philosophy, intentionally leaving anthropology behind. This is one reason Theresa Russell’s story is important.

Like several of our colleagues, we have focused primarily on the careers of women with a passion for anthropology who succeeded. We have used grounded methods to identify their strategies to overcome societal and professional obstacles, generate resources, and find interesting problems to tackle. This is one reason why we have both been fascinated with how women have thrived at disciplinary boundaries and margins, often espousing theories and writing programs that would take years for men to discover and exploit. From these biographies we have discovered patterns that reflect access and participation in American professions as a form of specialized work based on esoteric knowledge. One was that women gained initial recognition by writing popular accounts of their adventures in the field— that is, travelogues— and getting paid well for these works. Theresa employed this option to establish a new scholarly path, but it was not a path to an archaeological career. It is one where anthropological exploratory research was used as the entry into English, philosophy, and psychology. We welcome other scholars to look for similar instances. We are sure they exist.

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Also critical for understanding the Russells’ fieldwork were the development of anthropology as a national discipline and the growth of physical anthropology/ anthropometry as a distinct subdivision of the multifaceted endeavor to understand humanity’s development and variability. This involved more than expounding interpretations and developing framing theories. Striving for professional status included demonstrating that anthropology was a natural science, with original data that could be standardized and measured. Frank was concerned with improving anthropometric and osteological techniques, inventing precise measuring tools, and standardizing methodologies as well as with how anthropology would be taught in universities.

When they made their first trip, the Russells had intended to return to Harvard University, where Frank would pursue the institutionalized academic year of teaching and a summer fieldwork schedule. Theresa could continue to study philosophy and have stimulating conversations with her peers. They did not think they would spend the next two years surveying Arizona and participating in ethnographic field work full time. They covered a phenomenal area. Frank estimated that by October 1902, they had traveled 4,000 miles exclusive of train travel each year. The undertaking was comparable to the areas covered by European scholar explorers Adolph Bandelier, who looked for sites in Arizona between 1880 and 1885; and Alphonse Pinart, who searched for sites in 1876, traveling from San Diego to Tucson and around central and southern Arizona. As J. Jefferson Reid and Stephanie Whittlesey discuss in their excellent history of Arizona archaeology, archaeologists in the 1880s and 1890s did not attempt to survey the entire state as they searched for suitable sites. Most men and women worked in a single region each season. This in itself makes Theresa and Frank’s stories memorable.

Nancy J. Parezo is a professor emerita of American Indian studies at the University of Arizona. In addition to teaching at the institution for almost forty years, she was curator of ethnology at the Arizona State Museum and loaned executive to the Arizona Board of Regents. She also participated for ten years in the Smithsonian Institution summer training program in museum anthropology. The author of more than two hundred books and articles, she is currently working through the nine large four-drawer file cabinets that are full of data for more histories of anthropologies and museums, collecting behavior, and Native American repatriation. Her next project documents missionary Henry Voth’s collecting and ethnographic activities among the Hopi and Cheyenne. With her dear friend Don D. Fowler, she is dedicated to honoring the invisible female scholars who helped develop anthropology in the American Southwest.

Don D. Fowler is the Mamie Kleberg Distinguished Professor of Anthropology and Historic Preservation, Emeritus, at the University of Nevada, Reno (UNR). In 2019 the Don Frazier & Don Fowler Endowed Chair in Archaeology was established at UNR in his honor. His PhD is from the University of Pittsburgh. He has taught anthropology and historic preservation at UNR for forty years. He was a postdoctoral fellow in anthropology at the Smithsonian Institution in 1967–68, a research associate in anthropology for the Smithsonian Institution from 1970 to 2004, a past president of the Society for American Archaeology. He received the SAA’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 2003 and the Byron Cummings Award from the Arizona Archaeological & Historical Society in 1998, among other honors. He is the author or co-author of dozens of papers and reports on southwestern and Great Basin archaeology and cultural resources management, and, with co-author and great friend Nancy Parezo, publications on the history of European and American archaeology and ethnology.

Zócalo Magazine Shares Excerpt from ‘Desert Feast’

Posted on November 18, 2020November 18, 2020 by Mari Herreras

November 18, 2020

Tucson’s Zócalo Magazine recently featured an excerpt from Carolyn Niethammer‘s new book, The Desert Feast: Celebrating Tucson’s Culinary Heritage.

The Desert Feast offers a food pilgrimage, where stories and recipes demonstrate why the desert city of Tucson became America’s first UNESCO City of Gastronomy.

The excerpt tells part of the story of Sonoran wheat and how its introduction forever changed our region’s food landscape:

The easy and quick adoption of spring wheat can be attributed to the fact that it filled an important niche in the food cycle. And, as a new crop, it came without cultural baggage. Corn was traditionally planted and curated through its lifecycle with ceremony and song; wheat, on the other hand, with no such requirements, was easier to grow. We must not overlook the fact, though, that in some mission communities, the local people had no choice but were forced to grow wheat for the padres’ sacramental wafers.
By the mid-eighteenth century, spring wheat had become the major staple crop of the Tucson basin and far beyond. Although it does better with irrigation, in a normal, non-drought year, it could also produce an excellent crop in marginal soils of low fertility and with no water other than winter rainfall. With the abundance of wheat, women began making tortillas from flour instead of corn.

Read the entire excerpt here:

Excerpt: Reflections from Transborder Anthropologist Carlos G. Vélez-Ibáñez

Posted on September 16, 2020September 16, 2020 by Abby Mogollon

September 16, 2020

In his new book Reflections of a Transborder Anthropologist, Carlos G. Vélez-Ibáñez explores his development as a scholar and in so doing the development of the interdisciplinary fields of transborder and applied anthropology. He shows us his path through anthropology as both a theoretical and an applied anthropologist whose work has strongly influenced borderlands and applied research. Importantly, he explains the underlying, often hidden process that led to his long insistence on making a difference in lives of people of Mexican origin on both sides of the border and to contribute to a “People with Histories.” Today we share an excerpt from this important new book:

We carried into anthropology departments a penchant for looking at our own or culturally equivalent populations. We entered graduate departments despite our unease with most anthropologically oriented works, learned earlier from the pointed critical analysis by Octavio Ignacio Romano-V in his series of articles (1968, 1969a, 1969b). Anthropology had long believed that fieldwork demanded complete divorce from the anthropologist’s own cultural baggage and that an anthropologist must spend at least a year in the field becoming totally absorbed and immersed in the “new” culture and learning the language.

Most of us didn’t need a year to learn the language, we only needed to renew it. We felt for the most part that the global processes since World War II did not allow for the idea of pristine peoples; also, we strongly felt our own discontent with the loss of land, language, and expectations of relations, and with American educational institutions’ strong insistence on replacing the abhorrent identity of “Mexican.” The term was associated basically with impurity of racial mixing, low IQ and great brawn, and a predilection for not delaying gratification, favoring partying, fiestas, and merriment at the expense of education, learning, and planning for the future.

Many of us had observed our parents working two jobs, fighting in wars— with some not returning— and, of those who remained, achieving when they should not have been able to do so. We also observed and participated in thick networks of relatives that could mostly be depended on in times of crisis.

What we read was mostly in opposition to what we knew to be true, and this opposition was certainly congealed in educational institutions where all things allegedly “Mexican” could be driven out. Thus, of this initial generation, most were male, many were veterans and some tried in combat, some were politically practiced, and all were tired of the status quo for too many Mexican-origin populations on both sides of the bifurcation we call the border.

For me, what beckoned was south of the border, and it is there I began my own quest.

Stephen Pyne’s Op-Ed in The Los Angeles Times Warns of a Wildfire Contagion

Posted on August 25, 2020August 25, 2020 by Savannah Hicks

August 25, 2020

Stephen Pyne’s Op-Ed in The Los Angeles Times addresses the current wildfire explosion in California and across the globe in recent times, offering a warning of the very fire-inflicted future ahead of us.

“The big payoff against contagion comes from systemic preparations. Emergency medicine can cope with a coronavirus surge only if other work flattens the curve of infection. Emergency firefighting can cope with outbreaks on the scale of California’s only if we address that fraction of climate, fuels and ignitions that remain within our reach.

We can eliminate obvious points of contact, such as powerline failures during Santa Ana and Diablo winds. We must tend to landscapes with pre-existing conditions — drained by drought, covered in feral fuels, buffeted by high winds — that can push mundane outbreaks toward lethal outcomes. We must promote community fire-wellness programs and practice routine watchfulness to reduce vulnerability.”

Read the entire piece here.

Stephen J. Pyne is an emeritus professor at Arizona State University. He is the author of more than 30 books, mostly on wildland fire and its history but also dealing with the history of places and exploration.

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Pyne’s latest volume with the University of Arizona Press is To the Last Smoke, which offers a unique and sweeping view of the nation’s fire scene by distilling observations on Florida, California, the Northern Rockies, the Great Plains, the Southwest, the Interior West, the Northeast, Alaska, the oak woodlands, and the Pacific Northwest into a single, readable volume. The anthology functions as a color-commentary companion to the play-by-play narrative offered in Pyne’s Between Two Fires: A Fire History of Contemporary America. The series is Pyne’s way of “keeping with it to the end,” encompassing the directive from his rookie season to stay with every fire “to the last smoke.”

Charles Bowden’s Blue Desert Featured in Harper’s Magazine

Posted on July 24, 2020July 24, 2020 by Savannah Hicks

7/24/2020

In the August 2020 issue of Harper’s Magazine, Wes Enzinna writes an essay on Charles Bowden that praises, criticizes, and recognizes Bowden as a shrewd predictor of the current chaos surrounding the United States borderlands. Below, read an excerpt from the essay which pertains to our book Blue Desert, originally published in 1986 and recently re-released with a new forward by Fransciso Cantú in 2018.

“For all his cynicism, Bowden’s response to this crisis was never a desire to strengthen the border, but rather to destroy it. ‘There aren’t any Mexican stars or American stars,’ he once said in a radio profile, as he hiked with the correspondent through the Buenos Aires wildlife refuge in southern Arizona, a popular route for migrants sneaking into the United States. ‘It’s like a great biological unity with a meat cleaver of law cutting it in half.’ His work was an attempt to heal this cleavage, and to remind us how our hunger, pollution, and violence connected us all, especially in the Sonoran and Chihuahuan Deserts, where nature was a stingy mother and death ruled over everything. ‘We are becoming more and more aware that our civilization destroys the foundations that support it by devouring the earth and the things of the earth,’ he wrote in Blue Desert. ‘But we don’t have the courage to back away, to stop, to restrain ourselves. I know I don’t.’

Like the beasts and criminals he admired, Bowden was a complicated, contradictory creature. He loved dogs, dirt, wine, worms, Cadillacs, cacti. He held backyard parties to watch summer cereus flowers bloom at midnight, and owned scores of guns but was reluctant to shoot them lest they scare the birds. In Most Alarming, a priest named Gary Paul Nabhan reports that the last time he saw Bowden the surly old tough guy was weeping for a cottonwood tree that had died. Bowden’s teeth were falling out. He was poor and owned little more than a laptop, a Le Creuset pot, a sleeping bag, a Honda Fit, and a pair of binoculars. If in life he sometimes failed to be a decent man, in his writing he tried to be a better animal. ‘The whippoorwill’s name reflects the sounds we hear it make,’ he once wrote in a letter to a friend.”

Read the entire essay here.

Published in 1986, Blue Desert was Charles Bowden’s third book-length work and takes place almost entirely in Arizona, revealing Bowden’s growing and intense preoccupation with the state and what it represented as a symbol of America’s “New West.” In a thoughtful new foreword, Francisco Cantú writes, “In Blue Desert, we follow Bowden in the processes of becoming. We see the version of Bowden that he would likely most want us to remember—someone who did their best to be an honest witness, someone who was haunted by modernity and his place in it, someone who grappled with his demons by gazing deeply into the desert.”

Charles Bowden (1945–2014) was the author of many acclaimed books about the American Southwest and U.S.-Mexico border issues. He was a contributing editor for GQ, Harper’s, Esquire, and Mother Jones. His honors include a PEN First Amendment Award and the Lannan Literary Award for Nonfiction.

Diana Negrín on Cracking the Silence on Racism in Mexico

Posted on July 23, 2020July 23, 2020 by Abby Mogollon

July 23, 2020

Recently author Diana Negrín published a piece in Medium about racism in Mexico. Negrín is the author of Racial Alterity, Wixarika Youth Activism, and the Right to the Mexican City, which examines the legacy of the racial imaginary in Mexico with a focus on the Wixarika (Huichol) Indigenous peoples.

In the piece in Medium, Negrín writes, “A few years back it would have been very difficult to find platforms through which to discuss race and racism in Mexico. When I began sharing my writing and research detailing the contemporary experiences of Indigenous youth as they confronted and challenged structural and everyday forms of discrimination, few people I encountered, beyond the Wixarika university students who collaborated and protagonized my research, seemed interested. Within Mexico, the fact of racism has often been downplayed by the country’s long tradition of centering the mestizo identity as one that is composed of various racial and ethnic lineages. European cultural mannerisms, political economic orders, language, and general world views were to replace or, at the least, hybridize with Indigenous heritages.”

See the complete piece here.

‘The Sins of Our Fathers’: An Excerpt from Vanessa Fonseca-Chávez’s Forthcoming Book

Posted on June 17, 2020June 17, 2020 by Abby Mogollon

June 17, 2020

In New Mexico two statues of Juan de Oñate, sixteenth-century Spanish conquistador who founded the first Spanish town in the present-day Southwest at San Juan de los Caballeros, were removed following protests this week. In this excerpt from Vanessa Fonseca-Chávez’s forthcoming book, Colonial Legacies in Chicana/o Literature and Culture, we learn that this action follows decades of a contested conversation:

Within the colonial kaleidoscope, everyone sees the pieces differently. There are prisms that reveal a propensity to shut out others. If one’s own privileged history or legacy is at stake, then they choose not to look or acknowledge history beyond their own perspective, for if they validate the existence of oppositional thought, it somehow diminishes their own story. Indigenous histories represent the jagged fragments that, when viewed separately, tell a more complex history that needs to be seen and acknowledged. For Indigenous people, colonization itself is a jagged edge that will never find a solid place within the kaleidoscope. But this same history represents a point of pride for people who hold on to these legacies.

Patricia Marina Trujillo, Corrine Kaa Pedi Povi Sanchez, and Scott Davis (2020) refer to Oñate as a chispa, the flyaway piece of hair that keeps resting on your face. You tuck it back, but you know it’s bound to get loose again and be bothersome. Oñate is a tired, drawn-out character in the story of New Mexico. How do we secure this chispa? And where? National debates in 2017 surrounding Confederate flags and statues in the South and monuments, more generally, suggest museums as potential locations, rather than public spaces as a site of remembrance.26 And Guthrie (2013) reminds us these sites serve as an epicenter for the politics of recognition with ties to how we celebrate multiculturalism, specifically in New Mexico. The white supremacist marches and counterprotests in Charlottesville, Virginia, prompted social media users and KUNM, a public radio station broadcasting from the University of New Mexico’s Oñate Hall (sigh), to return to the topic of Oñate’s legacy in August 2017.

As I finished this chapter, I could not find a way to break away from the controversy surrounding Oñate that was again brought to the forefront via national conversations on Confederate statues. A recent manifestation of resistance to this narrative was the renaming of the Oñate Monument Resource and Visitors Center as the Northern Río Grande National Heritage Center, whose vision centers on the economic sustainability of the people of the northern Río Grande. This marks a shift from an Oñate-centered space to one that demonstrates an investment in and recognition of the economic structures that were created through centuries of colonial violence in New Mexico and the Southwest. The rededication of this space came to my attention through a Facebook post by Patricia Marina Trujillo on March 2, 2017, where she included a photo showing a new sign posted near the Oñate monument. The sign, a conquistador hat with a line through it, was accompanied by Patricia’s hashtag, #buenobyeoñate. Though the artist was not known at the time of her posting, it marks a pattern of resistance to the Oñate narrative and a desire to move past exhausted, old arguments of former Spanish glory that fail to nuance history.

Just as 1998 prompted new conversations about Oñate’s legacy in light of the four hundredth anniversary of his arrival, so too did more recent events surrounding monuments dedicated to Confederate heroes. In 2017, on the cusp of the Entrada Pageant in Santa Fe for the annual Santa Fe Fiesta held each September, the Oñate statue located in Alcalde, New Mexico, was vandalized with red paint covering the left foot. Painted on a nearby wall were the words “Remember 1680” (Bennett 2017). This act demonstrated a continued lack of interest by some in celebrating pageantry and monuments to Spanish colonization, and a reminder that this conversation may never be silenced.

Vanessa Fonseca-Chávez is an assistant professor of English at Arizona State University. Her work focuses on colonialism, place studies, and the narratives of southwestern U.S. communities. She is co-editor of Spanish Perspectives on Chicano Literature: Literary and Cultural Essays and Querencia: Reflections on the New Mexico Homeland. Colonial Legacies in Chicana/o Literature and Culture will be published by the University of Arizona Press in October.

The University of Arizona Press