Su Libro
learning from the land
Gear up for New Mexico’s centennial of statehood with an insightful history book, an in-depth look at the art and meaning of Western ranch gates, and lessons learned teaching on the Navajo Nation.
Telling New Mexico: A New History, edited by Marta Weigle, with Frances Levine and Louise Stiver, Museum of New Mexico Press, hardcover, $45, paperback, $29.95.
Ranch Gates of the Southwest, by Daniel M. Olsen and Henk van Assen, introduction by Lucy R. Lippard, text by Kenneth I. Helphand, Trinity University Press, hardcover, $45.
In the Sun’s House: My Year Teaching on the Navajo Reservation; by Kurt Caswell; afterword by Rex Lee Jim; Trinity University Press; paperback; $17.95.
This article first appeared in Autumn 2009 Su Casa
Telling New Mexico: A New History, edited by Marta Weigle, with Frances Levine and Louise Stiver, Museum of New Mexico Press, hardcover, $45, paperback, $29.95.
Published to coincide with the grand opening of the New Mexico History Museum, an annex of the historic Palace of the Governors, and edited by Marta Weigle, Telling New Mexico pulls together articles and essays from 50 diverse writers. The list of stellar and sometimes surprising contributors—historians, anthropologists, novelists, journalists, Chicano studies professors, Native American scholars, and so on—includes Alfonso Ortiz, Rick Hendricks, Jason Silverman, Peter Iverson, Rina Swentzell, Jake Page, Sylvia Rodriguez, William deBuys, Robert J. Torrez, Malcolm Ebright, Herman Agoyo, and Paula Gunn Allen, among many others.
Though undeniably academic in intent, this is not your high school New Mexico history text recycled. Even the casual reader will find plenty of bite-sized morsels to satisfy an afternoon’s nibbling, and those more serious about their historical diet will appreciate the diverse perspectives assembled by editor Weigle with Frances Levine and Louise Stiver.
Naturally, the big topics and big events command their share of ink here. The written record is well covered, from the arrival of the Spanish through the Pueblo Revolt to Mexican independence from Spain and trade with the Americans, then on to the American conquest and so on. It covers local wars, the Civil War in New Mexico, slavery (of Native Americans, not African Americans), early-20th-century labor disputes, the settlement of Blackdom, New Mexico, by former African-American slaves, World War II and its impact on the culture and economy, the evolution of Los Alamos . . .
But Weigle includes context pieces, as well, essays that articulate and even celebrate the intangible qualities of place that define New Mexico. Thus in the opening essay, popular author and novelist Jake Page writes about the light here. Reminiscent of a classic book about New Mexico from the 1940s, Sky Determines by Ross Calvin, Page begins, “The most important natural area in New Mexico exists wherever one goes in the state. It is the sky overhead. For overhead is the great light show, the special quality people find in New Mexico that they cannot quite describe. . . .” In the same vein, Larry S. Crumpler wonders “what makes New Mexico exceptional” and finds an answer in geological diversity and the abundance of volcanoes.
In counterpoint to the traditional romantic reaction to New Mexico, Native American authors bring another view. The late anthropologist, San Juan Pueblo member, and inspiring University of New Mexico professor Alfonso Ortiz finds much to celebrate in the time-depth of culture here, the 2,000 years of “clearly unbroken cultural identity” among the native people. Reversing the usual historian’s perspective, Ortiz writes that the “Spaniards of Europe learned to belong” to New Mexico—that was their adaptation after the Pueblo Revolt of 1680. Rina Swentzell writes about the Pueblo people’s sense of sacred space in the landscape: “For the Pueblos . . . the entire world is special, sacred space.” San Juan Pueblo Tribal Council member Herman Agoyo closes the anthology with his piece on the leader of the revolt, “Po’pay: A Pueblo Perspective on the Leader of the First American Revolution.” That essay’s title serves as a reminder that the Anglocentric version of American history, which implies that the nation developed from east to west, ignores entire epochs of human occupation within our current borders.
Weigle herself takes on the whole notion of “enchantment” in her essay on “alluring New Mexico.” The Santa Fe Railway, the Fred Harvey organization (all those hotels, lunchrooms, and “Indian detour” excursions), and the New Mexico exhibits at various national expositions early in the 20th century launched tourism as a major industry here, one that continues unabated today.
One major tourist magnet involves an event that maybe did, maybe didn’t really happen. William E. Gibb’s essay on the Roswell incident explores the famous alleged UFO crash in the desert 60-some years ago. As an urban legend with a persistence that has now eclipsed Elvis sightings at Wal-Mart, the Roswell incident rivals the Loch Ness monster as an enduring bit of apocrypha that has come to define a place, making the town famous for an event that can’t be proved real. And so he concludes: the evidence doesn’t support a conclusion. And that vagueness gains heft from the government’s resistance to full disclosure. Stay tuned, X-Files fans.
On a lighter pop-culture note, Jason Silverman recounts the story of roots rock-and-roll in eastern New Mexico in his essay, “Not Fade Away: Buddy Holly’s Surprising Clovis Studio.” If you don’t know already, Holly teamed up with Clovis native Norman Petty, in whose studio they recorded such oldies-station staples as “Peggy Sue,” “Not Fade Away,” and “That’ll Be the Day.” It seems such an unlikely setting for an Ur-rock legend—Holly influenced John Lennon and the Rolling Stones—and such a refreshing addition to the canon of New Mexico history that a class field trip to the restored studio might be in order.
As an anthology editor, Weigle isn’t afraid to include the personal, either. For instance, in “Making Spanish-American Identity” John M. Nieto-Phillips tells the author’s personal history: with his family in 1972 he reverse-migrated from California in a converted delivery truck back to his mother’s hometown, Bernalillo, New Mexico. She was determined to dance with the Matachines during the San Lorenzo fiesta, which celebrates Don Juan de Oñate’s reconquista of New Mexico and subsequent peace making with the pueblo people. As a boy, Nieto-Phillips knew the story so well it bored him. Who cares? he asked his mother. You should, she replied. These are your roots.
Identity issues run throughout Telling New Mexico just as they have run through New Mexico, a peculiar melting pot if ever there was one, for centuries. The interplay of cultures—even between cultures within cultures—continues to shape the human landscape. If you want to understand this place, I can’t think of a better recent book to pick up first. Then go to the new history museum in Santa Fe for a full-body immersion in the topic.
Ranch Gates of the Southwest, by Daniel M. Olsen and Henk van Assen, introduction by Lucy R. Lippard, text by Kenneth I. Helphand, Trinity University Press, hardcover, $45.
Attracted to the design and typography on gates they saw on such road trips, collaborators Olsen and van Assen slowed down, pulled onto the shoulder, and took photos of gates across Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, Utah, Nevada, and Oklahoma. Olsen, a designer and photographer, writes that he felt drawn to the gates as “charged space.” He saw them as objects through which the residents constructed their own identities. The gates express a strong sense of individualism while claiming the property behind them. Van Assen says he gravitated toward the letter forms on many of these gates, which stand as a kind of folk art involving typography and iconic images like cowboys, horseshoes, even ranches’ brands.
Both authors exhibit a photographic fascination with the setting of the gates: context is everything. Take the two-page photo of a ranch gate north of Moab, Utah, for instance. With its web-shaped swinging arms, bar-M lettering, and no attached fencing, the gate makes a minimal statement about the ranch up the road. But the land around it lies frozen under snow, the ranch road untracked, the distant mountains a chill, pale blue under an equally polar sky. Or the 11-shot composite panorama of the Tierra Grande gate—where is that? It looks like south-central New Mexico—which seems impossibly isolated in a sweeping landscape of grasslands and far-away low mountains, a train rattling by in the distance, no visible evidence of the ranch headquarters. The same goes for the John Goetsch Ranch sign, a simple inverted triangle, the ranch brand at its bottom fulcrum, and the plaintive text “n 5 miles” enunciating the degree of loneliness between here and there as the ranch road trails far out of sight into a short-grass prairie under an immaculate New Mexico sky.
This tension between signs and landscape, words and space, informs every image in the book, making it a page-turner. The images accrue meaning when viewed as a set—not that they explain each other, but flipping the pages amplifies their impact. Although these photos refrain from judgment or irony, the intellectual foundations of Olsen and van Assen’s project imply an academic point of view, a concept, and perhaps even a hypothesis with anthropological overtones. One might similarly approach Chaco Canyon or the ruins at Tsankawi—through the camera’s point of view seeking insight into a vanished and silenced culture.
That once-removed academic vantage point is reinforced by landscape architect Kenneth I. Helphand’s essays introducing each chapter, which parse the topics of property and naming, thresholds, and typology as they pertain to ranch gates. This is an outsider’s interpretation of the West. Nowhere in the book do we see or hear from the local folks. No doubt the ranchers who live up the road from each of these gates might feel a bit mystified by all the attention, as much by the two dollar words and alien theorizing as by the carefully framed photographs—what’s next, cattle guards?
Maybe the justification can be found in the penetrating foreword written by the always-discerning art critic Lucy R. Lippard, who admits that most of these gate makers would be surprised to hear themselves called artists, but “it makes little difference what is called Art and what is not. The important factor is whether it catches the eye, the heart, or the mind of the viewer. Many of these gates do just that. . . .” And these gates created the opportunity for art when the photographers focused on them. Through a triangulating process—gate, photograph, reader—meaning is brought to bear on a fresh subject, since few of us have ever ruminated on the cultural messages encoded in ranch gates. By lingering over these images and reacting to them, we’re drawn into a contemplation of Western places that might deepen our relationship to them: they’re worth thinking about.
As a book about design, about typography and typology, Ranch Gates might appeal to designers of a certain rustic-Dwell leaning. As a book about the West, it should interest anyone who lives here who thinks about the nature and character of the region. Ranch Gates is consummate myth-making, implying a kind of lost-Eden sense of abandonment, a quixotic relationship between people and the place they’ve settled. Since they’re never seen in the photos, we’re free as readers and viewers to invent them. As Lippard—a New Mexico resident—writes in the introduction, “We can only imagine the lives, the stake, the reasons why the gates look the way they do.” Of course, we could just drive up the road and ask the folks who live there . . . but that’s a different book. And besides, if we did that, the West would no longer be an empty page for us to fill. Pondering whether regionalism remains a force in America, Lippard notes that the Southwest “is an amenity target in part because the past is still present, because Americans miss the past even as they discard it. New Mexico, for instance, is still ‘different,’ and thus immensely attractive to those disenchanted with what the rest of the country has become.” When that disenchantment meets this enchanting and receptive place, it seems, one is free and empowered to remake oneself. Just like the Western frontier of America’s mythic past, there’s no one in the picture to get in the way.
Ranch Gates is really about that difference Lippard describes as it can be found across the broad Southwest, about the myth of frontier in its 21st-century expression: personal reinvention in a wilderness landscape where people have thus far barely penetrated its secret backcountry. Take a look. It’s still out there: the New West is the Old West.
In the Sun’s House: My Year Teaching on the Navajo Reservation, by Kurt Caswell, afterword by Rex Lee Jim, Trinity University Press, paperback, $17.95.
What could have been a stranger-in-a-strange-land comedy of manners and mistaken customs takes a darker, angst-ridden turn in this memoir. “Maybe I was so absorbed in my own troubles that I was incapable of stepping outside myself,” he speculates. Most of the book proves out that theory. Yet Caswell is so certain he could do nothing to help these kids out of their chronic poverty or to instill a faith in the power of education to transform their lives that he “fell into a kind of sleepy indifference.” His motives mercenary and self-serving, he admitted, “I never meant to care.”
Surely the kids could tell. They’d probably seen a procession of white teachers from someplace else pass across the front of their classrooms. Middle schoolers everywhere test their teachers. These kids tested hard. And from the git-go, Caswell unintentionally alienated many of them. With little initial sense of dedication to his students, he reacts to them with petulance, irritation, and anger. Only gradually does he begin to penetrate the subtle barriers of culture and language as he takes them on a camping trip, escorts a small group to the spelling bee, and mingles at the school’s Christmas bazaar.
Caswell also develops a relationship with the rugged desert-mesa landscape around him, taking weekend getaways with a friend teaching at a distant school, hiking the mesa behind his trailer, surviving flash floods and windstorms and spooky encounters with dead horses. The romantic landscape helps take the edge off the angst and alienation he felt “working out here at the edge of the world.” Bit by bit, Caswell reveals how the problem isn’t the place: it’s him. When Sakura comes to visit, he can’t quite bring himself to marry her; that relationship will collapse from inattention and a fear of commitment. Though he makes progress relating to the kids and finds ways to enjoy his isolation, it becomes clear Caswell is hiding out, avoiding bigger decisions that would force him to embrace responsibility. In this sense, it’s a coming of age story.
By the year’s end, Caswell is ready to move on—that was a foregone conclusion, justified by extensive ruminations on the meaning and value of travel as avocation—off to another teaching gig then another. Eventually, we surmise from his biographical information on the book jacket, he ends up teaching college in Texas. While this memoir avoids the carpetbagger tone that sometimes plagues writing about New Mexico by those who don’t stay, it likewise eschews the palpitating romanticism that often infects the writing of those who do stay. Caswell sees his Navajo students as kids, plain and simple, not as the “white man’s Indian.” But by the end of the book you have to wonder: did he make a difference?