My Penitente Land

Reflections of Spanish New Mexico

Angelico Chavez, Fray Angelico Chavez

• Editorial: Sunstone Press
• Año: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781611394757
• Categoría: Theology & Religion
• Categoría: Religious Institutions & Organizations

This unusual book, Fray Angélico Chávez's personal meditation on his cultural heritage, is also a kind of spiritual autobiography of the Hispano people of New Mexico. The spirit of New Mexico, he feels, grows out of its dry mountain terrain whose hills and valleys resemble those of Spain and of ancient Palestine. Just as this kind of landscape helped the Hebrew shepherd Abraham to find his God, so in Fray Angélico's view, have New Mexico's mountains kept her people close to their God. In evoking this special closeness between the divine and the human, the author returns repeatedly to the Penitentes of New Mexico-the societies of men who scourge themselves and replay the Crucifixion each Holy Week to share the sufferings of their Savior. Some of his ideas will spark controversy over the meaning of New Mexico's past, but Fray Angélico Chávez's viewpoint, representing that of many native Spanish Americans, deserves the attention of every reader with an interest in the state's Hispanic heritage. No one can read this book without gaining a new understanding of the world of the New Mexican Hispano imbedded in the dry, hilly landscape of the majestic Sangre de Cristo mountains.

Part One

HOLY
LAND

Yahweh alone is his guide,
with him is no alien god.
He gives him the heights of the land to ride,
he feeds him on the yield of the mountains,
he gives him honey from the rock to taste,
and oil from the flinty crag;
curds from the cattle, milk from the flock,
with rich food of the pastures. . . .

—Deuteronomy 32:12—15.

1

Cross over Jordan

The day I was born and christened—it was a clear and flowery one in April—all kinds of colorful ceremonies marked the event alongside the big swirling river. That morning a formal proclamation was issued, and there was a solemn high mass with an appropriate sermon. In the afternoon the militia held a review. Then a stirring drama, which was composed for the occasion by one of the captains, was staged by some of the men. These things were duly recorded as a matter of course.

Later on, a long epic poem by another captain recalled the happy occurrence, also relating in vivid detail whatever took place months before the actual birthday and in those that followed. In short, everyone present knew that this was not only a happy communal celebration but a very sacred one as well.

Actually, I am describing the birth of my people and of their own way of life, the beginnings of the Hispanic inhabitants of New Mexico and their own particular culture, on that feast of the Ascension of our Lord, the thirtieth day of April in the year 1598. On that memorable morning along the banks of the southern Rio Grande, Don Juan de Oñate, adelantado for King Philip II of Spain, or advance leader of the first permanent colony sent to these parts—which his followers were vocally regarding as a Promised Land—took solemn possession for God and King of a brand-new infant Spain at the outermost edges of the then-known world.

"New Mexico" was the name given to this Hispanic enclave across the wilderness, fully two hundred and forty years before there ever was a republic called Mexico south of here. "Mexico" meant just a city then and for more than two centuries thereafter. The only Mexicans at that time were the Nahua or Aztec native Indians of that city and its great valley, who had been conquered by Hernando Cortés some seventy years previously.

And it was less than twenty years before, in 1581, that three little Franciscan friars had come up this very Rio Bravo del Norte, as the Rio Grande was then called, expecting to find a great harvest of souls like the one which the pioneer Franciscans with Cortés had garnered in the fabulous city and valley of Mexico. The nine soldiers escorting this zealous but naive trio had also dreamed of finding the same golden treasures which the army of Cortés had plundered in that fateful city. Hence both the friars and the soldiers were seeking another, a new Mexico of that rich sort, if for totally different motives, and that is how the name took root. Those three friars—Rodríguez, López, and Santa María—were soon slain by the Tiwa Indians of the middle Rio Grande Valley, after the soldiers had set out for home empty-handed. But the name endured, to be adopted by the Crown when it sent Don Juan de Oñate to found a colony there.

His act of royal possession took place at a pleasant oasis of gnarled cottonwoods along a grassy bank of the river, some three hundred miles south of present Santa Fe. The swift murky stream was swollen by spring freshets fed by melting snows in distant high sierras. These were as yet invisible on the wide screen of the far northern horizon, but they were said to preside over a land flowing with milk and honey. For this present spot was not the Promised Land itself, only the approach to its gateway. It was, as it were, the site across the River Jordan where Joshua and his Israelites, after a forty-years' wandering in the wilderness of Sinai, were poised in eager readiness to enter Palestine.

These Spanish wanderers, too, had undergone the hardships of a great Sinaitic desert in their slow wayfaring northward from Zacatecas far south in New Spain; and, as said before, they were actually comparing their journey with the final one in Exodus. Now, in the manner of the biblical patriarchs, Oñate gave the place a meaningful memorial name. He called it La Toma, which means "the taking" of possession. By a happy coincidence, this very word is emphasized in Joshua 4, even if used in a contrary sense, as when the Lord said to him by the Jordan: " 'Today I have taken the shame of Egypt away from you.' Hence that place has been called Gilgal [take away] until now."

And how good the land looked to the people even then, though only an oasis by a river in that desert solitude. Their sudden relief from their Sinaitic desert sufferings made them exaggerate the reports on the land which an advance party had brought them. "Like the olive branch brought by a dove," the colony's poet-captain wrote later, painting to excess the flora and fauna much as did the reports of Joshua and his own reconnoitering party about Canaan. Even the parched and starved cattle, "like those of Nineveh," were envisioned thanking the Lord for the fresh swards of grass and other foliage.

Today the community of San Elizario below the modern city of El Paso in Texas occupies the site, but with the river running on the opposite side of the narrow and shallow desert valley.

All the birthday ceremonies having been properly taken care of, the happy and expectant colonists trekked several miles upstream along the river's left bank and, finding a good place to ford it at a bare stone-mountain pass which they named El Paso del Norte—the Northward Passage—they crossed over Jordan.

* * *

Several human factors in history as well as certain features of geography compel one to make these comparisons regarding the birth of a people, including the continual scriptural allusions, with the least fear of committing a conceit or striving after a tour de force. The basic material for such analogies is there in the documents. The colorful atmosphere persists even to this day throughout the same terrain and sky. The spirit of it all brims in my heart.

For a person who has closely studied his own blood lines back through the myriad-veined system of a dozen generations, and in the same setting of a particular landscape which is likewise part and parcel of his own being, knows what makes him tick. His most intimate feelings reflect this double heritage of flesh and soil, and he in turn is enabled to know what such forebears felt at that time and in succeeding instances of recorded history.

This is why I began by saying that I myself was born when those first Spanish settlers were preparing to enter New Mexico, their land and mine. A goodly number of them are my own proven direct ancestors, some by several lines. Therefore, when I intrude with personal memories or genealogy now and then, it is not to cater to a certain human weakness, but to knit the woof of narrative more tightly or highlight the colors and design. The case is very much the same with regard to biblical allusions. Scripture is brought in, not to prove sectarian doctrine one way or the other, but to follow a basic historic monotheism which, born on the dry Palestinian landscape, was grasped by its pastoral folk and later by other pastoral peoples of similar landscapes in a way decidely different from other groups of mankind elsewhere. When certain mythological factors in the same revered pages are brought out, it is only to show how so much misunderstanding came to plague the human adventure among diverse peoples in their common search for the divine. And whenever the Book's rich imagery happily coincides with the theme—as just now in this Jordan crossing—it is a literary windfall and nothing more.

"The adventure of humanity," Jules Romains wrote, "is essentially an adventure of groups." Ever since man began, groups of humankind have developed in their own beliefs and life modes according to climes and places. These have given birth to new groups who by some instinct have chosen the same kind of territory for their habitat. In this way they continued ancestral and religious patterns if in modified forms. It is this matter of habitat, or more properly of a landscape's essence simmering in living blood, which so stirs up the imagination as to lead one to speculate on matters which science might frown upon, but which art ought not gainsay.

2

Lands of Genesis

There is something about landscape which helped determine the traits and character of different peoples in ages past, when the earth seemed flat and infinite and puny man wandered about one small space of it for generations on end. What landscape brought about lies beyond those measurable factors found arranged within the cores of genes and chromosomes. It has to do, rather, with the experience gained through the outer senses, mainly the eye.

Just as mouth and nostrils took in food and air for every function and development of the body, the eye kept gathering in the familiar terrain close at hand, together with the hues and shapes of the horizon all around, and no less the various aspects of an all-encompassing sky, to store these impressions within the self. Ear and nose, too, and also the whole periphery of touch, gave their perceptions to the process. What they and the eye passed on to the brain kept draining into the living essence of the person—into his blood, as the saying goes.

There were no other distractions then, like modern print and the more pervading visual and audial electronic miracles of our day, to blur or strain away those images. They molded and tinted an individual's thoughts and feelings, betimes coming to find new being in his visions and in his dreams.

1. The People Who Found God

Take the dry interior uplands of Palestine, which people of greener countries like to call deserts. But they are not deserts to those others whom they have nourished for ages. They consist mostly of sparsely grassed, rock-strewn plains napped a tawny gold that turns to rich olive in the springtime. These plains break up into rolling hills, big ones swelling over the smaller ones, all having the same hue and cover.

Sheep and goats, especially, find it a paradise. It is a land made for erect shepherds, not for stooping peasant-tillers of the soil. True, bits of red or yellow desert also dot the terrain, but these are offset by small oases of fresh green groves and vineyards. Larger areas of true desert, like the Negeb, lie off at the edges and can be recognized as such by contrast. Part of the good land is also broken up by stony tablelands and wind-carved sandstone cliffs of varied ochre hues, and there are the blue outlines of high mountains in the distance. All over you will also find dry riverbeds that turn into swift torrents when rain happens to fall somewhere.

It is now known that in earlier biblical times Palestine was indeed "the good land" described in Deuteronomy 8, centuries before it was stripped of woods to make the land more barren. It was more like the northern New Mexico or the central Spain of former times, before climatic changes or land abuse did the same. Yet, withal, it was not the green land of the rainier areas of the world. It was more pastureland than a soil for any extensive farming.

Hence agriculture in Palestine was secondary even in ancient times, confined to parts of lowland moistened by small springs, or to the winding valley of a single Jordan drawing thirsty spirits as well as parched throats to its refreshing banks of green. The prevailing way of life was therefore pastoral, not agricultural, and there is a marked difference between the two which sets the shepherd or stockman distinctly apart from the farmer or peasant.

For ages families and tribes moved with their droves of domestic animals up and down their allotted grounds, ever appreciating to the fullest every tuft of grass on plain and hill, each shallow water hole or rain puddle. What few farming lands there were could not compare in extent and verdure with those in earth's regions of much more frequent rain. Yet they were a welcome auxiliary here, producing enough bread and wine to temper the heat of sun and the fat of mutton. In time, small towns grew up at crossroads, providing nests of culture as well as bastions of defense whenever the tramp of foes was heard upon the land.

But it is the gold and olive landscape as a whole, its waves lapping not only at the walls of town or garden but at the hems of the tents and very hearts of the inhabitants, which had come to make the latter love it as sailors love the sea and are salted by it. No less did the unmarred blue sky in that crystal air become a beloved and familiar acquaintance, from frequent scanning for signs of clouds that might or might not come to pour down blessings. These very clouds often took on the contours of the land below as if they were its ghostly counterpart. And at night, because of that same dry clear air, the stars in thick glittering clusters brought heaven very close, for thoughts that rose up above the daily need for food and water. Land and sky got a double hold on the tenders of sheep and goats and cattle from the time when man first started breeding these cleft-hooved ruminants in the dry uplands of the ancient Near and Middle East.

And so the children of Abraham found God in this type of landscape, so open and clear, and with a sad beauty so much like that of the human condition as to make one think that it also has a soul. Their sacred writings say that God found them instead and let them hear his voice. But they were better enabled to hear it because the dry uplands and their pastoral life had helped attune their ears and hearts to its call. This personal divine adventure found its personification in a man called Abraham, and much later in another one named Moses.

What all this has to do with the founding and the characteristics of an almost insignificant Hispanic colony of latter times, and on the earth's opposite side, may not seem apparent now, save for what has been said concerning landscape and its influence on people. What will be pursued from here on in some detail, about the relationship of an ancient pastoral people and their God upon a similar landscape, may also appear farfetched at the moment. But the strange divine yearnings which are the burden of this story go back all the way to that bittersweet romance which began with Abraham within a life mode and a landscape very much the same. Unless his own experience and that of his semipagan Canaanite kin are told, the modern mind cannot even begin to understand such a simple phenomenon as that of the Penitentes.

* * *

No such personal experience as Abraham's happened to the original Hebrews' mixed Semitic and Hamitic kinfolk and neighbors who chose to cultivate vast plantations and build great cities in the wide fertile alluvial valleys of the Nile on one side and the Tigris and Euphrates on the other. Now, when we speak of Semitic and Hamitic peoples we are employing a broad traditional distinction based strictly on languages which science has adopted. Physically, these ancient caucasoid peoples were a more or less look-alike mixture of still more ancient tribes who for long had inhabited that vast region. They were a fair-skinned folk deeply tanned by the sun, whether as upland shepherds or lowland agriculturists, and their prevailing black hair was either straight or frizzled.

The racial terms used are borrowed from two of the "sons of Noah," Sem (or Shem) and Ham, who represented the ancestry of these two linguistic groups to the Hebrews. The third so-called son, Japheth, represented a very distinct language grouping, among which were the Greeks' ancestors and the Philistines. To these can be added all European groups in general, and all together they can also be referred to as Aryans. This is what influenced the biblical writers themselves, who knew no other human varieties than these three, and thus the impression was created that all humankind came from three individual persons bearing these names. For this was the only world that they knew, the arc or inverted crescent curving down through their own homeland from the Asiatic steppes "east of Eden" to the Nile Valley.

The extensive agriculture of the Nile Egyptians and the eastern Mesopotamians, made possible by their great rivers' silts and the most ingenious methods of irrigation, is what gave rise to the fabulous commercial centers of Egypt and Babylon some five thousand and more years ago. Between them, later on, lay the port cities of the northern Canaanites in Asia Minor, whose builders and sailors combined and further developed what Egypt and Mesopotamia had to offer. In such agricultural and trading capitals were born the practical arts of government and commerce, along with the smelting of copper and bronze, and later iron, not to mention the more delicate crafts of goldsmithing and ceramics.

Most important of all, out of all this blossomed the much finer arts of cuneiform and hieroglyphic writing with their corresponding literature. The northern coastal Canaanites, later called Phoenicians, carried forward this primitive art of writing to produce the alphabet on which all our Western world depends. All this was long before the original pastoral Hebrews, after adopting the Canaanite alphabet and some of its literat...