Swadesh, Curator of Ethnology at the Museum of New Mexico in Santa Fe, and author of 20,000 Years of History: a New Mexico Bibliography, traces for the first time in detail Hispano colonization of the Chama and San Juan basins of northern New Mexico and southern Colorado. Conditions and challenges on the Ute-Navaho-Apache frontier “bent the rigid and hierarchical rules of Spanish colonial society to simpler and more egalitarian forms, while maintaining a strong sense of community and many gracious traditions in the face of hardships” (p. 4). A harmony of interests was worked out between Hispanos and Indians, for which there is no comparable example between Native Americans and “Anglos.”
American conquest, in 1846, brought to power individuals who devoutly believed in Indian extermination, unleashing a period of hostilities worse than anything previously seen. Federal officials and practices lent themselves to the unscrupulous, who by devious means and intimidation cheated the heirs of Hispano pioneers out of their property. Community lands often ended up as National Forests, fell into the hands of powerful Anglo ranchers, or were unretrievably denuded by out-of-state concerns. New Mexico was denied statehood until a system of controls was established “to keep the Indian and Spanish-speaking New Mexicans well in hand through a system of patronage and threats of sanctions against resisters” (p. 29), a colonial status from which, in the author’s opinion, the state has in many respects never emerged. The process of loss of Hispano land continues today, as reflected by the Alianza movement headed by Reies López Tijerina. Swadesh began her study in 1960, just as “the government was about to displace whole communities again [for Navajo Reservoir] and was remunerating people for their condemned lands at a rate that made it impossible for most of them to replace that which they were losing” (p. 3).
Hispanos evolved a resilient culture that survives today, except where impoverishment obliges families to splinter and migrate to urban slums. Swadesh wonders “whether it is just—or even sensible—to put groups of human beings through such a cultural wringer” (p. 4). Amid a majority culture that “faces an internal crisis brought on by some of its less flexible customs,” she considers it “senseless to continue insisting that cultural minorities in the United States put aside their own traditions to conform to the ‘American Way of Life’.” “Having survived in the face of adversity, including that which our dominance has imposed upon them, they can teach us a great deal about cultural survival and social adaptation” (p. 5).
Beyond being a mine of data upon the mechanisms of “internal colonialism,” the work will be valued by those interested in Indians, Spanish borderlands, Hispano ethnography, and anyone seeking to understand the background of economic and social unrest everywhere in the rural Southwest. It will be especially treasured by Americans descended from pioneer Hispanos and detribalized Indians of northern New Mexico for its meticulous footnotes offering leads to genealogy, land grants, and tribal affiliations. Characteristically, Swadesh has committed all royalties from her worthy study to the Clínica del Pueblo de Río Arriba in Tierra Amarilla, scene of a notorious land-grant steal.
