Petitioning for change
Author pushes for owners to rename DeVargas Center
Just a few hours after the city removed the Don Diego de Vargas statue from Cathedral Park early Thursday, Santa Fe author James McGrath Morris posted a petition on change. org asking the owners of DeVargas Center to change the mall’s name.
Morris is no Johnny-come-lately to the push for cultural sensitivity. His petition includes excerpts from an opinion piece that was published Aug. 24 in — before historical transgressions became the hot-button national and global talking points they are today.
“This is the moment to change the name of the Santa Fe shopping center known as the DeVargas Center,” the petition reads. “The mall owners should follow in the steps of the Caballeros de Vargas, organizers of La Entrada, the annual reenactment of de Vargas’s re-entry into Santa Fe. Over the last few years, protesters brought attention to the inaccuracies of the event [and La Entrada was discontinued].”
“I thought I was prescient,” Morris said Friday. “There are descendants who are proud of the [de Vargas] name. There are descendants who find him oppressive.”
DeVargas Center management is observing the societal shift of the past few weeks, an official said.
“I’ve taken this all the way to corporate,” said Katy Fitzgerald, senior project manager at DeVargas Center for Fidelis Realty Partners, which owns the mall at the north edge of downtown. “There are discussions commencing.” Fitzgerald did not elaborate.
Morris also questioned the naming of Coronado Center, a large mall in Albuquerque, but as a Santa Fe resident, he has not pursued anything there.
Don Diego de Vargas was a 17th-century Spanish governor who led the 1692 reconquest of Santa Fe after the Pueblo Revolt of 1680. Sixteenth-century explorer Francisco Vázquez de Coronado led the first Spanish expedition into what is now the American Southwest.
Morris said he believes social change in the public applies to the business sector, too.
“The basic message is it would be a good business decision to consider a change to the name of the DeVargas Center,” he said.
He noted Quaker Oats’ decision this week to drop the Aunt Jemima name and accompanying image from its pancake-mix product, and Land O’Lakes in February dropped the image of a Native American woman from its butter packaging.
Morris, whose most recent book is The Ambulance Drivers: Hemingway, Dos Passos and a Friendship Made and Lost in War, is finishing a biography of New Mexico bestselling author Tony Hillerman.
Morris, co-founder of the Biographers International Organization, also gives history-laced bus tours of New Mexico as one of a dozen program leaders in the state for Road Scholar, a travel-oriented education organization once known as Elderhostel.
“I do education tours of New Mexico and the Navajo Nation,” he said.
“Think of it as an education tool on a bus. These are folks who are really interested in learning. One of the points I make is history plays out in the current day.”