Querencia

Reflections on the New Mexico Homeland

Vanessa Fonseca-Chávez, Levi Romero, Spencer R. Herrera, Vanessa Fonseca-Chávez, Levi Romero, Spencer R. Herrera

• Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780826361615
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

New Mexico cultural envoy Juan Estevan Arellano, to whom this work is dedicated, writes that querencia "is that which gives us a sense of place, that which anchors us to the land, that which makes us a unique people, for it implies a deeply rooted knowledge of place, and for that reason we respect it as our home." This sentiment is echoed in the foreword by Rudolfo Anaya, in which he writes that " querencia is love of home, love of place." This collection of both deeply personal reflections and carefully researched studies explores the New Mexico homeland through the experiences and perspectives of Chicanx and indigenous/Genízaro writers and scholars from across the state. The importance of querencia for each contributor is apparent in their work and their ongoing studies, which have roots in the culture, history, literature, and popular media of New Mexico. Be inspired and enlightened by these essays and discover the history and belonging that is querencia.

PART I

Community Querencias

In Community Querencias, readers are asked to reflect on the claiming of querencia through contestatory communal practices related to identity formation within different geographic spaces. The three chapters contained in this section illuminate the need for storytelling and active listening as a necessary process for agency and claiming homespace. Specifically, the authors demonstrate that community legacies—what we inherit and what we choose to pass on—are an important aspect of the ever-evolving nature of querencia for new generations of Indigenous tribes and Nuevomexicanos.

In chapter one, “The Long, Wondrous Life of Ventura Chávez, 1926–2013,” Simón Ventura Trujillo engages in questions of land-grant tenure and dispossession through the eulogy of his grandfather, Ventura Chávez, also referred to as El Viejo. For Trujillo, El Viejo’s life connects the individual to the communal through an extensive network of Indigenous memory. The military veteran returned to his homeland in northern New Mexico and became active in La Alianza Federal de Mercedes in the late 1960s. Trujillo reflects on the wisdom of his grandfather as a social critic and an important storyteller not only in his family, but for the rest of the Indo-Hispano pueblo. Trujillo’s commitment to El Viejo’s stories came through an active listening process, coupled with his own research on Reies López Tijerina, a land-grant activist. Tijerina’s decolonial desire for land, as Trujillo states, merged what seemed like two dissimilar paths of knowledge into one that left him reckoning with the forms of settler forgetting that animate US policies in New Mexico and the broken promises of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Unfortunately, as many of us have experienced, our desire to see grandparents as keepers of subjugated knowledge often comes late. In 2011, El Viejo was diagnosed with dementia and lost the ability to hear and tell stories. In this context, Trujillo uncovers El Viejo’s written journals and reveals the decolonial emotion and passion still evident in the last two years of his life. He ends his chapter by reinforcing El Viejo’s claim to an Indo-Hispano identity under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo—“an occupied territory under alien landlords.” For Trujillo, El Viejo embodies the querencia for a homeland as an “ongoing and active formation of rebellious storytelling.” Stories are integral to sustaining a holistic sense of self, as they connect us to our querencias and to the people with whom we share our love for the land. Through the eulogy form, Trujillo activates storytelling through the land. The land gives us our stories and the stories sustain our place in the land.

In chapter two, “Remapping Patriotic Practices: The Case of the Las Vegas 4th of July Fiestas,” Lillian Gorman analyzes cultural materials during a three-year period of the 4th of July Fiestas in Las Vegas, New Mexico, as a way to examine how self-identified Hispanics from this area contribute to larger conversations on nationhood. She looks at the Plaza de Las Vegas and affirms it as a home space for locals and for parientes (relatives) who make an annual pilgrimage to the fiestas to reunite with familia and see old friends. Many “Diasporic Hispanos” from Las Vegas and surrounding communities who were forced by economic conditions to move elsewhere return each year, reacquaint themselves with their culture and traditions, and partake in the celebrations around food, music, the parade, and the crowning of la reina (the queen). This notion of homecoming, writes Gorman, “is key to understanding the ways in which returning for fiestas contests dominant narratives around the 4th of July and re-semantifies the celebration.” While these fiestas are celebrated during a patriotic national holiday, cultural markers associated with the 4th of July are often not present. Gorman shows how, instead, New Mexican Hispanics engage in a transposition of local stories as a way to demonstrate how tradition works as a contestatory practice. For her, this site embodies both grounded and disrupted querencia: it sparks memory and remembering for Hispanic New Mexicans who reside in Las Vegas, allowing them to gather as longstanding communities and to participate in storytelling, while people who have left and returned must go through the painful process of collapsing past memories with present traditions. Nonetheless, as Gorman argues, Las Vegas serves as a homespace that resists patriotic memory and instead celebrates the ways in which Nuevomexicanos reinsert querencia and local histories into larger national narratives.

Chapter three, “Critical Conversations on Chicanx and Indigenous Scholarship and Activism,” is organized around four central questions prompted by Vanessa Fonseca-Chávez. The discussants, Kevin Brown, Tey Marianna Nunn, Irene Vásquez, and Myla Vicenti Carpio, begin by situating the conversation in relation to their own senses of place across New Mexico and the southwest United States. By doing so, they recognize where they are coming from and how this has informed their social and political commitments in New Mexico and elsewhere. Each participant reflects on the practices of commemoration, memory, and placemaking and, more specifically, how Chicanx and Indigenous communities can work together to build bridges and solidarity for decolonization. For Nunn, it is not enough to say we are working with community: we must always look beyond the façade of words and think about how we enact and embody community in our work. Vicenti Carpio and Vásquez highlight responsibility and obligation as necessary mechanisms to work with the community through an understanding of Indigenous methodologies and Chicana and Chicano studies critical frameworks. Brown emphasizes the need to speak out against colonial representations such as the Three Peoples mural at the University of New Mexico. In doing so, he notes that student organizations like the UNM’s Kiva Club have been pivotal to breaking down boundaries and creating community on college campuses. Each of the participants looks with a critical eye at claiming space and is cognizant of the need for Chicanx and Indigenous communities to work together to tell stories that transcend colonial narratives. They end their conversation by offering suggestions on how to heal from colonial trauma.

As each of these authors demonstrates, active engagement with the community is necessary to define querencia through contestatory practices. As we encounter dominant systems of erasure and attempts to limit New Mexico Indigenous, Hispanic, Indo-Hispano, and borderlands agency, we do so with a heightened awareness of our querencia. La comunidad aquerenciada (the querencia community) resists the imposition of identity and history and, instead, elevates local voices and stories and considers homeplace as an important site of resistance and identity formation.

CHAPTER ONE

The Long, Wondrous Life of Ventura Chávez, 1926–2013

SIMÓN VENTURA TRUJILLO

Corncobs and husks, the rinds and stalks of animal bones were not regarded by the ancient people as filth or garbage. The remains were merely resting at a midpoint in their journey back to dust. Human remains are not so different.

LESLIE MARMON SILKO | “Interior and Exterior Landscapes: The Pueblo Migration Stories”

Makers pose a danger to those who fear. Because revolutions begin with love. Campesino wars begin with love. Art begins with love. Love is inspired by art. We makers have nothing to lose and nothing to hide. We are fearless, fearless. We are born, we love, we die, and there is not much more that really matters in the end. And so we pass the rope, not thinking about what will happen to us once we collide with the earth, force the ash to rise. And trust you can withstand the fire in your hands.

HELENA MARÍA VIRAMONTES | “The Writes Ofrenda”

Family, friends, and all of our relatives.¹

Hello, bienvenidos (welcome), and good evening.

Thank you for meeting here to read this eulogy on the life and work of my grandfather, Ventura Chávez.

I used to call him El Viejo.

At the age of eighty-six, after a three-year struggle with Alzheimer’s disease, El Viejo returned to the land at his home in Albuquerque, surrounded by family, on March 11, 2013.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines a eulogy as “a set oration in honour of a deceased person.” As this is an oration dedicated to El Viejo’s long and wondrous life, however, I want to put the eulogy form to a different kind of use to explore connections between genealogies of land-grant tenure and dispossession, the colonial legacies of racialized and gendered labor, and the politics of land and organic radicalism in New Mexico. This means violating certain narrative precepts of the eulogy form. Rather than stressing the exceptional trajectory of El Viejo’s life in individual terms, I’m telling his story to constellate a broader network of Indigenous memory and endurance within occupied New Mexico. Rather than equating his death with finitude, this eulogy is about coming to terms with the fact that the dead never stay still—that, as Raymond Williams (2009) writes, “the dead may be reduced to fixed forms, though their surviving records are against it” (129).

As some of you may know, in the 1960s and early 1970s El Viejo and my grandmother, Cruzita Chávez, were active members of the New Mexican land-grant movement La Alianza Federal de Mercedes (The Federal Alliance of Land Grants). For the past decade, I have been researching and writing about La Alianza’s cultural politics as a way of rethinking the questions of land, race, and indigeneity in the formation and dispossession of Spanish and Mexican land grants in the Americas. El Viejo’s eulogy, then, is also a story of how I came to this work. Or rather, it is a story of how this work came to me—how I came to inherit this work from my grandparents, and what it means to remake it in our present moment.

In addition to being a grandfather, parent, husband, son, and brother, El Viejo was one of the sharpest social critics I’ve ever met. For someone who only attended school until the age of thirteen, he possessed a wisdom that came from way before his time. He found lifelong inspiration from the stories of our Indigenous and settler ancestors. Despite his limited formal schooling, he was an avid reader of New Mexican history and culture. His personal library, in a single bookcase in his room, was an eclectic mix of Spanish and Mexican land-grant historiography, Chicana/o borderland history, Native American philosophy, Christian mystical literature, and Western fiction. Titles such as David Weber’s Foreigners in Their Native Land and Vine Deloria Jr.’s Behind the Trail of Broken Treaties sat next to a vast collection of Louis L’Amour novels. Frank Waters’ Book of the Hopi, Fabiola Cabeza de Baca’s We Fed Them Cactus, and Fray Angélico Chávez’s My Penitente Land resided alongside works on prophecy and interplanetary influence by Edgar Cayce. As an organic radical intellectual, his embrace of the power of storytelling upended the social and disciplinary boundaries among myth, history, and fiction. He knew that stories are the way we make this life meaningful in the face of death. He knew that without our stories, we have nothing. In short, among being a cowboy, a railroad worker, a sailor, an aircraft painter, and a radical civil rights activist, El Viejo was a storyteller.

Here is a story about the storyteller.

El Viejo was born on October 30, 1926 on a small ranch a few miles outside of Cuervo, New Mexico—a small village east of Santa Rosa that was reduced to a virtual ghost town by the construction of Interstate 40 in the middle of the twentieth century. He was the youngest of thirteen children born to Mariana Maestas and Manuel Chávez. Mariana was the granddaughter of a woman of Cherokee descent who was adopted to be a servant for the Lucero family in New Mexico.² Manuel was a sheepherder who worked for the Bond and Weist Company on land that was formerly the Anton Chico and Pablo Montoya Land Grants, which itself was terrain that hosted a complex network of Kiowa, Comanche, and Apache tribes before that.

With instruction from his father, tíos (uncles), and older siblings, El Viejo learned how to ride horses, herd sheep, and work as a cowboy. When he was thirteen, his father froze to death after getting caught in a blizzard while returning home one night from Anton Chico. Three years later, El Viejo lied about his age and joined the Navy. After training in San Diego, he was stationed in Okinawa, Japan, and served as a gunner on a battleship during World War II. While in the Navy, he met a professional fighter from New Orleans named Earhardt who taught him how to box, a skill that would serve him well in subsequent years.

After the war, El Viejo returned to New Mexico for a while, picked up work as a cowboy, and helped at a gas station that he and his brother, Procopio, had built. Later, with assistance from the GI Bill, he moved to Kansas City, Missouri and attended a trade school for paint and body work on cars and airplanes. When he completed school, he returned to New Mexico and met Cruzita Baros, or, as her grandchildren call her, Nana. They married in 1957, and together had five children.

Sometime in the early 1960s, El Viejo attended a meeting of a newly formed organization in New Mexico called La Alianza Federal de Mercedes. While there, he met its president, Reies López Tijerina. For a long time, the United States government and the media told Native and mestiza/o peoples who were poor and landless that their poverty came from being culturally backward, from not being able to speak English, from not knowing how to “develop” the land properly, and from being a degenerate mixture of American Indian and Spanish. Many people continue to believe that story to this day. Yet with members like Nana and El Viejo, La Alianza provided a way of speaking back to the lies and misrepresentations proffered by the US government and our national culture. The group challenged the idea that being mixed American Indian and Spanish was a marker of shame. They challenged the idea that the poverty endured by Pueblo and Indohispano peoples was a result of our so-called backward nature. Rather, they...