In 1974 Arno Press and editor Carlos E. Cortes produced The Mexican Americans, an enormously useful but outrageously expensive collection of twenty-one volumes. A third of those dealt exclusively with New Mexico, among them the two under review.
Ernest Fincher’s study of Hispanos in New Mexico politics, a doctoral dissertation completed at New York University in 1950, is reproduced in facsimile. The only survey of the subject, it contains invaluable information drawn from oral interviews with participants. Fincher rejected simplistic cultural determinism, so attractive to social scientists of his day who blamed Mexican culture for the Mexican’s place on the lower rung of the American social ladder. Fincher recognized that Anglos, too, blocked Hispano advances and he saw that political equality was not possible without greater economic and social equality.
The New Mexican Hispano contains four separate studies. Two are facsimiles of pamphlets published by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, treating a single village on the Pecos River: “Culture of a Contemporary Rural Community: El Cerrito” (1941), by sociologists Olen Leonard and Charles P. Loomis, and “Camera Report on El Cerrito” (1942), by photographer Irving Rusinow. The Leonard-Loomis pamphlet remains valuable, although Leonard included portions of the text in his better known book on El Cerrito: The Role of the Land-Grant in the Social Organization and Social Processes of a Spanish-American Village (1943). Rusinow’s straightforward photographs are sometimes moving, but poorly reproduced. The New Mexican Hispano also contains facsimiles of two delightful and fascinating collections of folk and family lore. We Fed Them Cactus (1954), by Fabiola Cabeza de Vaca, describes life on the llano estacado of northeast New Mexico and northwest Texas in the late nineteenth century; Shadows of the Past (1942), by Cleofas Jaramillo, focuses on the Arroyo Hondo area of New Mexico (the reader is led to believe this is a new book because the facsimile is derived from a 1972 reprint; the original 1942 date is nowhere indicated). Jaramillo, a folklorist, included song and verse along with enchanting stories and reminiscences. Unlike Jaramillo, Cabeza de Vaca showed considerable concern for verifying the historical accuracy of oral traditions. That is a mixed blessing, for one cannot easily distinguish between the folklore in this volume and the information that she gleaned from modern written sources.
