I held back some photos from a trip to New Mexico in April because the period between September 15 and October 15 is Hispanic Heritage Month.
Americans are often history amnesiacs. They look at a map of the United States and think that the lines delineating the states have always been where we see them now. At best, they carry vague memories of having once studied “something or other” about how the U.S. acquired the land from “sea to shining sea.”
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| 19th c, House of Manuel Baca y Delgado |
Borders have legal status but are by nature as fictional as those dotted territorial map lines. Only human beings are expected to honor them. There is a living history museum about 20 miles south of Santa Fe called El Rancho de las Golondrinas. Golondrinas means “sparrow” and, if you think about it, birds are among the creatures that couldn’t care less about borders.
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| 18th c Tower and Fort |
A small history lesson: The place we call New Mexico was once part of indigenous North America. This changed in 1598, when Spanish conquistadores led by Don Juan de Oñate came to the region. That same year, Don Pedro de Peralta founded Santa Fe. Pueblo peoples rebelled against erstwhile Spanish masters in 1680, but a new conqueror, Don Diego de Vargas, returned the area to Spanish rule in the 1690s. And so it remained until 1821, when the Mexican Revolution succeeded in establishing Mexico as independent from the crumbling Spanish Empire. The northern part of the new Mexican state had been dubbed Nuevo México by the Spanish and so it remained, though it was a large territory that contained lands that are now part of Arizona, Colorado, and New Mexico.
Nuevo México was seized by the United States after the Mexican-American War (1846-48), along with lots of other land that became all or part of most of California, Nevada, Utah, and (eventually) Texas. What did that mean for Mexicans? Everything and next to nothing. Like the swallows, borders were treated as the fictions they are throughout the 19th century and into the 1930s. Los Golondrinas was part of an arid valley culture that stretched south from Santa Fe to Mexico City.
When we use the term Hispanic, technically it means those who come from places where Spanish became the dominant language. In North America, a Hispanic person can be one whose family roots are in the Iberian peninsula or one whose birth ancestry was Mexican or Indian. As often as not, Hispanics are mestizo (Spanish + Indian), pardo (Spanish + Indian and/or African), mulato (Spanish + African), zambo (Indian + African), or some other combination.
To cut to the chase, Hispanic is more of a cultural designation than a precise anthropological or biological designation. Los Golondrinas, which first opened in 1972, shows the evolution of hybridized cultural traditions in a place that was once one end of the Camino Real de Tierra Adentro, a major trail for the silver trade. It represents the 18th century through the dawn of the 20th.
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| Irrigation ditch |
Among its virtues is that it (mostly) keeps romanticism at bay. It’s hard to hide the reality that life in such a dry land was difficult and marginal. There is a small ditch that one could easily stride across that’s listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Why? Because it carries a trickle of water to parched lands. Signs along the property remind visitors to keep an eye open for rattlesnakes. (Luckily, they weren’t active in the spring!)
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| Adobe ovens |
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| Placita |
The building material of choice was adobe, chosen because mudbrick is easily made and because it insulates well against both cold and searing heat. Wood was used sparingly, was generally unfinished, and proved a better way to fence in animals that tolerated the harsh climate (burros, goats, sheep).
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| Catholic Church |
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| Late 19th c wooden structure |
Golondrinas Cultural diffusion is also in evidence at Los Golondrinas. That fancy term simply means that over time culture is as much of a mutt as the human gene pool. The Spanish brought Catholicism, Natives dug water ditches and harvested indigenous crops, Black and Mexican vaqueros were the prototype for cowboys, and Euro-Americans squeezed commerce out of the land. If you’re looking for any sort of pure Hispanic culture, that’s a bit like looking for Big Foot–more legend than reality.
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| Early 19th c talpa mill |
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| Tin shop |
If, on the other hand, you want to see how people lived, adapted, and innovated, Rancho de Las Golondrinas is a place where present-day people step back into the past. It has the added virtue of being just far enough away from Santa Fe that it’s seldom crowded. If you're anywhere near by it will entertain and enlighten.
Rob Weir
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