How La Raza became invisible
Part 2
WHY WAS LA RAZA erased from view? There were lots of reasons. The Mexican-American war (18461848), for one. La Raza were demonized as an enemy population. This happened only a few years before the founding painters arrived here in Taos. Even Mother, who was born one year after the Mexican Revolution (1910) in Douglas, Arizona, in a house near the border, mixed poison for Pancho Villa in her doll dishes.
Advocates for or expressions of Mexican autonomy and self-determination were discouraged by state officials and journalists, and this trickled into the popular imagination and memory. The literature of the time described the local population as “dirty, ignorant, drunken and lazy.” New Mexico’s petition for statehood was denied because of this “social undesirability.” So partly in the hopes that statehood would stop the massive land fraud, our politicians decided to emphasize our Spanish blood to “whiten” the petition, which was still not granted until 1912, and did not end the racism or stop the land loss.
The subtly racist mythologizing of the noble savage, a term invented by Jean Jacques Rousseau and propagated by Aldous Huxley, a member of Mabel’s entourage, was very much in the zeitgeist of the times. Mabel’s books and even those of D.H. Lawrence are haunted by the ghost of the noble savage and the idealization of the very cultures capitalist imperialism sought to subjugate.
But along with the noble image comes the shadow of the ignoble savage, to borrow a term from Tomas Atencio, historian and co-founder of La Academia de La Nueva Raza. Hispanics became the ignoble savages, illustrating once again how the myths and biases of every time in history shape the attitudes of whole epochs. The preexisting Spanish and Mexican presence in New Mexico has been almost completely erased.
In the eyes of Protestants riding the wave of Manifest Destiny, the picturesque enchantment attributed to the noble Pueblo savages did not extend to the ignoble Catholic Mexican savages – instead it was our land, labor and religious art, our santos, that they wanted. Just as painters and then the tourist industry idealized Native spirituality, they erased the spirituality of La Raza by sensationalizing, denigrating and persecuting the Penitente Brotherhood.
I remember stories of Anglo Americans creeping through the chamiso to spy on Penitente rituals, and knew the same people allegedly stole the santos right out of the moradas surrounding Taos.
The hippies repeated this syndrome of selective racism like some kind of eerie group reincarnation. While Dennis Hopper bought Mabel’s house and posted armed guards on the roof to look out for the ignoble savages, or Chicanos, inside noble savages from the Pueblo partied on Dennis’s nickel.
I know traditional people would consider it disrespectful to call the santos “just” art. Saturated and sanctified by the tears and prayers of generations the santos are sacred objects. But as art – they are some of the most powerful, original and beautiful sculptures produced in the United States. The theft of a people’s sacred art is a deep injury, but nothing contributed to the invisibility of La Raza more than the loss of the land in a historic land grab.
The Anglo American occupiers let the Indians keep most of the land immediately surrounding the Pueblos, although there was continuing encroachment everywhere else. But 85 percent of the land grants upon which the Spanish-speaking people had lived for centuries was lost in a historic, frenzied land grab before Anglo painters got here. The government confiscated millions of acres and converted it into BLM and Kit Carson Forest (now Carson National Forest); land speculators accumulated the biggest tracts of land in the history of the country – such as the Maxwell Grant.
Perhaps the most famous among the corrupt land speculators was Arthur Manby, who was murdered in Taos in July of 1929. My father was one of the businessmen who found his decapitated corpse when they went to collect unpaid debts, a thing for which Manby was known.
One of Daddy’s favorite Manby stories was about the hot springs that still bears his name. He owned the springs and the grazing land above and he sold it over and over again to poor, illiterate sheepherders. When their flock was conveniently corralled and several payments pocketed, Manby would dress up as a ghost and scare the superstitious sheepherders off, keep the money, the sheep and sell the land again, over and over.
Today the biggest landowner in New Mexico is the government. That land was once unfenced, open and free where people gathered piñon, firewood, herbs, hunted and grazed the livestock that were essential to the survival of our community and culture.
There is a dicho, “Cuando vino el alhambre, vino el hambre.” (“When the wire came, hunger came.”)
To be continued.