‘Each shirt represents a dream’: The fibers of New Mexico history
Taoseña Juanita Lavadie discusses Comancheros and Ciboleros in her latest project
HISTORY IS A MOVING TARGET. That’s one of the points Alicia Inez Guzmán made during a lecture she moderated at Albuquerque’s 516 Arts (516 Central Ave. SW) on Thursday (May 12). The lecture and conversation was centered around “Ciboleros and Comancheros: Commerce, Identity, and History.” It took place between Albuquerque Museum’s digital archivist Jillian Hartke and fiber artist and educator Juanita J. Lavadie whose project was the last installment of the Art Meets History-themed series at 516 Art, a non-collecting contemporary art museum.
Lavadie’s latest project features four woolen shirts that she crafted herself. On the second floor of the museum, the shirts are invisibly suspended in the air above a trade route map that she hand painted. Surrounding the exhibit were other projects exploring New Mexico histories through the use of photographs or collages with themes like Indigneity and Photography, the Black Geography of Albuquerque and more.
Lavadie’s shirts are modeled after 18th and 19th century tradesmen or Comancheros and Spanish colonial buffalo hunters known as Ciboleros. Accompanying the shirts are four imaginary Comanchero and Cibolero personas in four books that she bound herself. Each Comanchero or Cibolero is described extensively through family lineages, stories, poems and songs. Though imagined, Lavadie compiled these creations from years of research and exploring oral histories. Lavadie asserts that she is not a “scholar” but a fiber and graphic artist and an educator.
“I’m just a fiber artist with a lot of imagination,” Lavadie said during the conversation.
She said that “each shirt represents
a dream.” Through the interweavings of all these different elements, Lavadie works on exploring complex and nuanced identities that almost seem to transcend temporal space and time.
“Working with dreams was fun, because they come out of the subconscious and they can take many forms,” Lavadie said.
Guzmán expanded on that point and said that historians are “also working with dreams.” She explained that historians are constantly imagining what the past looked like, while they
parse through documents, paintings and artifacts.
The conversation paused for a lamentful ballad sung in Spanish by Acequia educator and anthropologist David F. García and ethnomusicologist Brenda Romero. García explained this was a ballad that circulated throughout New Mexico into southern Colorado. It tells the story of a young Cibolero attempting to spear a buffalo but his horse trips and the spear tragically pierces his body. After the ballad, Guzmán took a pause to let “that set in.” Guzmán said that music and the rest of the material items were just one way of better understanding the past. The ballad also complements Lavadie’s Cibolero story. The Cibolero named Eligio learns to be a lancer from his Tio Rafael. One night, Eligio has a dream: a large dark serpent with a fiery head that lays waste to thousands of buffalo. Lavadie said during the lecture the serpent was meant to signify the soon-tocome American railroad that she said was a leading attributing cause to the near extinction of the buffalo.
The Cibolero shirt woven by Lavadie that tells Eligio’s story feature’s back and white pattern “that you will find on commercial shirts” popularized by Mexican-Americans. She said the pattern would have come from the mid1770s.
“A lot of people are wearing that as a cultural pride shirt, but really the tradition of that shirt comes from the prototype of this one,” Lavadie said.
The Cibolero shirt took the longest to weave, Lavadie said. She had about an almost mile-long worth of woolen yarn that was hand spun and stitched over many weeks. The other shirts represent trade cloth from different time periods.
Another element of Lavadie’s project was working with Hartke on finding photos from the Albuquerque photo archive that helped add to the story. They found portraits of Comanchero descendents and of young rancheros at a mid-1950s New Mexico State Fair that carry on the tradition of Comanchero trade into the twentieth century. Hartke said it was a pleasure working with Lavadie on the project. Hartke explained that when there’s a topic that predates photographs, she brings in artists like Lavadie.
“I have to work with researchers and artists like Juanita to bring this history to life,” Hartke said.