Defining the De-Colonial Project This manuscript builds upon all of the work that precedes it, including my own work in and with community. As a colonial studies scholar, trained as anthropologist, historian and literary scholar, I have been thinking and writing about New Mexico history, including slavery and identity, which formed the subject of my doctoral work, for over two decades. In becoming the State Historian of New Mexico, a position I held for a decade, and in other subsequent positions, I have been working in and with community to recover histories, particularly the silenced and forgotten, and to help realize the relevance of these stories to the present and future.
In my most recent work as a consultant, in 2016, I completed Culture Connects Santa Fe, the City of Santa Fe’s first cultural plan, an effort based on broad and deep community engagement and extensive research and analysis. It culminated in a roadmap to elevate its assets and position Santa Fe as vibrant and meaningful to all its residents and visitors. Interested in deepening this 2016 initiative, particularly working toward understanding and addressing the various manifestations of historic trauma that have continued to divide the community, state and region, the McCune Foundation engaged me to develop a project with this objective as the focus. Initially, the work was defined by developing the Santa Fe Truth, Racial Healing and Transformation Initiative, with the targeted goal of establishing a commission. While it was always recognized that the transformation from something as profoundly complex as colonialism would be an extensive process, early stakeholder engagement revealed the need to undertake further research to underpin the long-term effort. In other words, it was determined there was a need to ‘make the case’ for why an initiative such as a commission would be necessary.
Decolonizing New Mexico is the culmination of that early engagement and the research effort that followed. Over the past year, as I have worked in this regard, the fractures and tensions have only become more acute and the need to focus all the more critical. Early in the process, my work was envisioned to center on the challenges embedded primarily in the Santa Fe Fiesta, toward navigating through and reimagining the event known as La Entrada, a historical pageant of the annual Fiesta that has long celebrated conquest through an idealized mythic past and that was an early 20th century invented tradition. Given the shifts in the scope of the work supported by McCune, revising the focus and timeframe, this did not happen. However, over the past year, I supported several efforts nonetheless to develop a deeper understanding of the issues and to begin catalyzing new possibilities. First, working with then Mayor of Santa Fe, Javier Gonzales, I recommended to him that he continue good faith efforts in a government-to-government role and relationship working with tribal leaders to chart a sustainable solution, though I also encouraged a deeper engagement process. I also cautioned that the work with Native American tribal communities was only a part of the issue and that reaching into the interrelated Indo-Hispano community was equally as urgent. Toward understanding the physical manifestations of colonialism, I also drafted a plan with a three-pronged approach for the Mayor to work with his staff to identify the following:
All City dollars that currently support organizations and events celebrating/honoring historic events or people that are perceived as denigrating of any Santa Fe population, past or present.
All City property that hold memorials that are perceived as denigrating any Santa Fe population, past or present.
Inventory of all City streets named after individuals/events that memorialize decimation/denigration of any Santa Fe population, past or present or that are perceived as such.
In spite of my encouragement to keep this process moving forward, while the work was started, it exists at present as nothing more than a static inventory, and may not necessarily be complete1.
During this period, I was also was invited by the leadership of the All Pueblo Council of Governors to become a part of a process, working with the All Pueblo Council of Governors, the Catholic Church/Archdiocese of Santa Fe and the Office of the Mayor, City of Santa Fe. In 2018, this effort expanded to include formal meetings with the leadership of Santa Fe Fiesta Council and the Caballeros De Vargas, the entity responsible for the Entrada. This collaborative effort, based on face-to-face constructive dialogue over the past few months, culminated in a reconciliation effort that has resulted in the discontinuation and complete transformation of an event, and as of the writing of this document, other efforts that remain ongoing, but positive.
Even then, I encouraged leadership to broaden and open this effort up, knowing that when this work is grounded in community, it emerges stronger.
While the present report began with a specific focus on Santa Fe, as it evolved, it became clear that the issues and their impact are much broader geographically. A year ago, a local community based cultural organizer, Roger Montoya, reached out to me to solicit guidance for his local community of Española, based just 30 miles north of Santa Fe. Like Santa Fe, the Española Fiesta was also an invention of the early twentieth century and has been defined by narrative components and core symbols that idealized a mythic past, place and its people, and was uncritically framed to celebrate colonialism. In May 2018, with the recent election of a new mayor, I was reengaged more formally toward rethinking the event and produced a document, “Reimagining the Española Fiesta: Proposing A Renewed Vision and Charter for the Fiesta Council.”
Leadership in both the community and at the City of Española culminated in a two-pronged approach to changes. First, the City created a Community Relations Commission charged to navigate community tensions based on historic trauma, and to identify opportunities to celebrate the community authentically. I was named an advisor to the effort, although that engagement did not seem to move forward meaningfully. Second, the City, which has operated the Fiesta, dissolved its legal and administrative charge to do so, resulting in some members of the community beginning to create a 501(c)3 to continue the Fiesta privately. This bifurcation reveals the ongoing fractures in the community.
Over the past several months, my work has expanded to other entities and efforts. I was asked to consult with the municipality of Taos around historic trauma issues and these conversations remain ongoing. I was also appointed in July 2017 by Superintendent Veronica Garcia to serve on the Santa Fe School District’s Diversity and Equity Council. Comprised of Santa Fe community leaders, the Council was charged with assessing and addressing issues of equity and diversity that impact the Santa Fe public schools. Inevitably, one of the major components of this work involved working to speak to underlying issues involving the Santa Fe Fiesta, particularly in its interface with the Santa Fe School District and this work remains ongoing.
What is local is always set within a broader national context and the same is true of this work. Communities across the nation are contending with the existence of monuments that were once placed in public spaces and exist as manifestations of historic trauma. At play are not only the questions of who owns the past, but who gets to define where and how history is memorialized. The subject of power, politics and practices embedded in how history and community memory developed is actually not new. In the post Civil War era, as historian W. Fitzhugh Brundage notes, “white southerners set about codifying their heroic narrative and filling the civic landscape with monuments” but even then Black southerners also began to reclaim and develop forms of cultural resistance in memory, but as Brudage notes this counter-memory was ignored or remained largely invisible in public spaces. Counter-memory was part of an effort that included for marginalized communities projects of recovery as much as it did resistance. It was not until the 1960s, as defined by the Civil Rights Movement that communities of color began to command a modicum of political power and to insist on a more inclusive history, particularly as manifest in public spaces and history curriculums alike. However, current tensions reveal how little traction has been made over the past five decades, and even where some changes have been made, the current socio-political landscape in 2018 reveals how unstable these gains may have been. With the election of Donald Trump, there is a resurgence of a particular brand of nationalism, replete with racism and patriarchy on the rise. Yet, communities across the nation have begun to respond with various strategies, including removal of imperialist monuments, while others have called for providing more context and counterpoint to these decontextualized monuments.
Moving Toward Reconciliation and Transformation While it is helpful to understand the national context, New Mexico, perhaps like any place, is unique. Here, cycles of conquest and layers of myth making have been long cemented into a community consciousness. This manuscript works to set the foundation for the work that is required to create transformation. Some of the questions before us are: how do we acknowledge the traumas of the past and yet still foster transformation in both present and future; how can we (re)imagine spaces, events and stories that are inclusive, that celebrate the complexity of its residents; how do take the harms and create possibility in healing?
At noted, at the heart of this initiative, the goal of this particular document, Decolonizing New Mexico, is to make the case for why it is imperative to initiate this process. Toward this end, this monograph has been developed to begin to document elements that constitute historic trauma in New Mexico and to explore the possibilities for transformation and healing.
Living history is learning from it. This is what it means to raise consciousness, part and parcel of the capacity of humanity. Toward this goal of accentuating the depth and breadth of what it means to be human, underlying this report is the objective of supporting catalytic transformation based on a balanced commemoration and critical approach. This work is based on three key principles that have and continue to define my work, an approach that is centered upon designing and implementing experiences that:
Nurture and raise consciousness: This effort should stir curiosity and is not simply about getting people to think about the world around them, including about the imperative of different points of view, but it is also about cultivating new forms of knowledge.
Build and foster community: The goal, I hope, encourages us to think deeply about how history and the sites that serve as its touchstones and as ‘community based assets’ as well as the events could be leveraged to fortify a community’s sense of its identity. More than just theorizing equity and participation, it is about working with the community to create relevant and meaningful experiences.
Illuminate and inspire creativity: My upbringing and professional training has grounded me in interdisciplinary approaches, and my professional experience has taught me that engaging creatives in the work reveals unexpected outcomes, deepening the interpretive work in community. This is as much about art and ideas as it is about innovation.
Decolonizing history is not easy. As Maori scholar, Linda Tuhiwai Smith, has cogently observed, “In order to decolonize our histories, we must revisit site by site.” Efforts to transform the impact of this trauma will actually require a concerted effort to contextualize and reimagine site-by-site, event-by-event and story-by-story. Ignoring this imperative and the opportunity before us is critical to creating new possibilities, including a healthy, vibrant and even more resilient communities. Similarly, in her work to recover Latina histories, Emma Perez, novelist and Associate Professor and Chair of Ethnic Studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder, uses the term “decolonial imaginary” as a way to overcome a colonial past, by literally re-inscribing new possibilities. Decolonial imaginary demands that we create a new type of map, a new way of recording presence and a new way of remembering ourselves whole. This counterpoint lies in our ability to creatively imagine the future, to ground it in the communities and networks that are essential to our communities, spaces that are changing all around us, and by this, raise consciousness core to the philosophy of why history matters. New Mexico’s story is certainly complex and full of contradictions, but here wisdom and memories resemble precious seed sand their germinative power lies in the capacity, as it always has, of their heirs awakening a practice of memory that does not complicate history, but invites us to make it.