Los antepasados – Latino Folklorists of Greater New Mexico

In 1598 Nuevo México was a viceregal kingdom whose ruling Juan de Oñate family charted its legitimacy through bloodlines of Basque, Criollo, and Mestizo genealogies that included both Cortés and Moctezuma. The original name of the northern frontier survived the founder’s expulsion and exile, the 1680 Pueblo Revolt, the emergence of the Mexican republic in 1821, the 1837 Chimayó Tax Rebellion, and annexation into United States in 1848. Like other administrative regions of the former Spanish Empire, emerging republics built national identities around literacy, newspapers, foundational fiction, and folklore. In the decades after the US invasion of 1846, Nuevomexicanos began to imagine themselves as a “nation within a nation.”

Visitors like the Swiss archaeologist Adolf Bandelier, travel writer Charles Lummis and early ethnographer Captain John G. Bourke, wrote some of the first accounts of Indo-Hispano cultural traditions. But as educational resources and opportunities improved, several generations of Hispano folklorists, our antepasados emerged to tell a more complete and nuanced story. When Lummis declared that traditional balladry was defunct in his 1897 overview of New Mexican folk music in the Land of Poco Tiempo, a seventeen-year-old student at the University of Colorado-Boulder, Aurelio Macedonio Espinosa, was already compiling a collection of narrative ballads sung in the San Luis Valley, including medieval and Renaissance romance ballads, as well as numerous contemporary corridos and inditas. 

By the 1890s Hispanos (Spanish speaking New Mexicans) had realized the truth of the ancient adage and ideal of “espada y pluma,” that the pen was as formidable as the sword. The latter holds sway over conflict in the moment, but only words inscribed could carry truth into the future. Decades before public schooling was available, people embraced the written word, and learned to read around kitchen tables, and in one-room village schools. By 1900, all along the Upper Río Grande corridor from El Paso to southern Colorado, there were dozens of Spanish language newspapers published in cities and towns. Besides news, editorials, letters, advertisements, legal notices, farming and veterinary advice, they were brimming with folklore and literature, offering a space in which oral traditions were documented.

Commemorative poems, songs, stories, aphorisms, riddles, stories, classics, and novels in serial editions were in every issue. A new generation of progressive journalists began to call themselves “Neo-Mexicanos” to project their voices into a new future. They believed the written word could change society, resist assaults on Hispano Mexicano culture, protect civil and property rights, and promote education and political participation. 

All over Latin America, newspapers created new virtual communities through print, one of the foundations of emerging nations. In the Upper Río Grande, Neo-Mexicanos were imagining cultural homeland with its own version of history, its own national heroes (including Popay, the leader of the Pueblo Revolt), its own literature. 

From the pages of newspapers emerged a cohort of creative writers, historians, and editors who created their own intellectual tradition. Like their colleagues all over Latin America, these community intellectuals, reporters, educators, and activists were creating a national culture, with their own view of history, their own literary canon. 

Educational leaders like Amado Chaves at the turn of the twentieth century and Dolores Gonzales after the Federal Writers Project (FWP) of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) era, and Roberto Villalpando in the 1950s, filled their curricula with regional classics, from the 1610 epic poem Verdadera Historia de la Conquista de la Nueva México by Gaspar Pérez de Villagrá, to historic folk plays like Los Comanches, the Pastorela, recent poetry and novels, and of course children’s literature and music for all the schools.

The first theoretical framework for research and teaching in higher education was Hispanismo, not to be confused with Hispanophilia, a contemporary, political strategy launched in Santa Fe, by impatient Anglo political leaders conspiring with Hispano (Spanish speaking) elites to hasten the transition from Territorial government to statehood. They privileged and exaggerated cultural ties to Spain, and packaged this “fantasy heritage” to disassociate the New Mexico and its peoples with Mexico so soon after the Mexican American War. Hispanismo emerged as an academic discipline in the wake of the Spanish American War simultaneously in New Mexico and Spain. 

Across the Atlantic, the famous Generación del ’98 arose from the tarnished ashes of militarism, colonialism, slavery, and its ill-gotten wealth. A new generation of thinkers, artists, writers, and teachers asserted that the true wealth of Spain is not its imperial project but the language, culture, literature, and arts of its peoples, in the peninsula as well as former colonies. In the universities the new discipline was born and christened Hispanismo (Hispanic Studies), that centered and clustered these interests and not the promotion of the imagined imperial glories. In the United States, new academic units simply called Spanish Departments emerged. Curricular reforms of the post-revolutionary Secretaría de Educación Pública in México were also an inspiration, for their inclusion of Indigenous cultures and enshrinement of Mestizaje. 

In 1910 after earning his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, Aurelio M. Espinosa founded the Spanish Department at Stanford University and authored a career total of twenty-two textbooks for use in primary, secondary, and post-secondary education. Many were filled with the folklore of his homeland that students read as they learned grammar, speaking, and writing. With systematic and more scientific study of language, Romance philology evolved into linguistics and dialectology. Students systematically studied verbal art and folk literature and transcribed and analyzed a corpus of thousands of texts. Dozens of men and women students collected folk stories and tales to chart origins and diffusions of the narrative tradition. Espinosa’s own foundational linguistics research was based on his corpus of folk stories. His disciples, including his son, Juan Manuel Espinosa, and Juan Bautista Rael continued the work on folk tales and the latter included new assessments of folk theater and religious ballads in his research trajectory.

By the 1920s and 1930s, an academic genealogy of Hispano folklorists linked regional universities in New Mexico, Colorado, and Texas to national networks including Stanford, Columbia, the University of Chicago, and the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. Later  the WPA created opportunities for more fieldwork. Benjamin Botkin, the folklore chair of the Federal Writers Project (FWP), consistently supported fieldworkers native to the cultures they documented. Homegrown associations like La Sociedad Folklórica de Santa Fe and the New Mexico Folklore Society flourished and created opportunities to document and celebrate regional cultures.

Some Chicanista scholars see Hispanismo as overly complicit in promoting the agenda of this political process of the invention of “Spanish fantasy heritage.” Others have reminded us that Hispanismo was not about identity formation or politics; it is about language and culture. Espinosa’s support for the nationalist cause in the Spanish Civil War decades later did not help temper the critique. He was ostracized by the American academy, and four decades of solid field work was erased from the canon of US folklore studies, although not from linguistics.

Arturo León Campa and Rubén Cobos were Mexican born folklorists whose fathers were killed in the Revolution and whose families took refuge in New Mexico. Their work closed the politically instigated gap that distanced their country of origin. They both started collections of folk music, poetry, inditas, and corridos. Campa wrote an encyclopedic overview of Mexican American culture in the Southwest, and Cobos compiled the landmark Dictionary of New Mexico and Southern Colorado Spanish. 

From a prominent newspaper family, Aurora Lucero White Lea was a university educated folklorist who was a FWP field worker and compiled her own collections of literary folklore. Outside the academy, a cohort of women writers emerged, including New Mexico’s prominent suffragist Adelina Otero Warren, the home economist and cultural historian Fabiola de Gilbert, and Cleofas M. Jaramillo, known for her depiction of village life.

Especially prodigious in the FWP were Lorin W. Brown, from the village of Córdova, whose numerous reports and vignettes were finally published in the 1980s, and Reyes Martínez from Arroyo Hondo, the brother of Cleofas M. Jaramillo. The tradition of Spanish language cultural journalism declined but persisted through the century, with El Nuevo Mexicano 1890-1958, whose last editor was the educator Pedro Ribero Ortega. El Crepúsculo of Taos, New Mexico’s first newspaper New Mexico, survives today as a Spanish language section of the Taos News, where elders like Adelecia Gallegos filled weekly columns with their folklore collections and new poetry.

The first in-depth work on Indo-Hispano culture sprang from the field work and first- hand experience of anthropologist Gilberto Benito Córdova, whose roots are deep in El Pueblo de Abiquiú. He is the first ethnographer to identify as Genízaro, an 18th century mixed ethnic group of captives, farmers, tradesmen, and militia. He was a principal curator for Smithsonian’s 1992 American Encounters exhibition honoring New Mexico.

Active culture bearers like traditional musicians and composers have also taken over an important role in cultural festivals, whether grass roots or with the support of local, state and national museums. Notable among them were Cleofes Vigil, a rancher, poet, and singer from San Cristóbal, New Mexico, and the famed corridista (ballad composer) and pioneer Mariachi, Roberto Martínez, of Chacón, New Mexico. The linkage of traditional and pop music was exemplified in the career of Alberto “Al Hurricane” Sánchez, whose musical clan can still be heard in dances, festivals, and on in the airwaves all over the Southwest and Mexico.

Cultural struggle in Greater Nuevo México has taken many forms over the last four and a quarter centuries. Multiple layers of popular and academic stereotyping still exist about role of folklore in the political process. In a twice conquered land, culture is both agent and antidote to colonialism. Rooted in the ancestral cultures of diverse peoples, folklore is still emergent. Expressive culture is by definition politically charged, and articulates shifting ethnic boundaries, difference, resistance, and change. As the step-sister to cultural nationalism, progressive as well as conservative, folklore must be decolonized in scholarship and performance.