Abstract
Strictly speaking, a haunting is distinct from memory, for it is not reducible to narratives articulated linguistically; it is, rather, an affect created by an absence that exerts a hard-to-articulate, non-discursive, yet positive pressure on the body, thereby turning such absence into a physical presence that is felt and that thereby affects. Most places are haunted by absences one way or another, and with different levels of intensity … the haunting that defines la frontera is that this is a region without Indians that nevertheless is not indifferent to their absence, and that has not fully broken away from this absence because of a twofold, ongoing, presence: the material debris that once defined the frontier and the “indigenous blood” of its population.
A few years back, I delivered an address to a graduating class of high schoolers in northern New Mexico, in which I offered my own rather fragmented and uncertain path to professional respectability as evidence that one can seldom discern the relationship between event and history with any clarity. I slyly (or so I thought) introduced my own curiosity about the life-stories of “small peoples” as prelude to my now-academic work on the potential to blend oral history, ethnography, and microhistory toward narrative, where matters of detail and scale seem possibly to align. While contemplating this comment on Gordillo’s Rubble, his graceful meditation on ruins and insights about the haunting presence (or absence) of Indians in the Argentine Gran Chaco, I recalled this talk and an email that arrived the following day.
Francisco, a graduating senior who had been in the audience, grew up in the mountain village of Córdova. He offered a local tale about an old Indian named Huachin and his relationship to the Hispano settlers of that plaza. It inspired me to pondered parallels and divergences across the Chaco and those New Mexican fronteras where I work. Francisco’s story rendered “haunting” in a somewhat different vein than those suggested in Gordillo’s passage above, adding texture, perhaps, to his exploration of the relationship between local peoples and the archaeological rubble that surrounds their daily lives—often in a markedly different register than the themes upon which the state’s heritage industry depends.
Huachin, said Francisco, had been the chief, and among the last residents of “Alto Huachin,” an Indian Pueblo that rested atop a prominence that loomed south of Cordova. After suffering a devastating raid by nomadic Comanches, who burned the village to the ground, he brought his few remaining kinspeople down into the Rio Medio valley and took shelter just upstream from Cordova Plaza, where they would gradually, across generations, blend into the vecinos of that settlement. My curiosity provoked, I did some looking and discovered a version of the Alto Huachin story in the Federal Writer’s Project (FWP) Oral History collections.
Alto Huachin, FWP fieldworker Lorin Brown was told on 9 September 1938 (Works Progress Administration WPA #220 NMSRC (New Mexico State Records Center)), was indeed a “Tano” Pueblo situated on the high, defensible promontory on the north side of Rio Medio (then called Quemado (burned), after the name given the pueblo itself following its destruction). NM #76, now the much-travelled scenic “High Road” between Santa Fe and Taos, bisected the “many mounds” of the 6-acre site, which in 1938 were marked by a cross raised on the eastern mound by village woodcarver don José Dolores López. Even with early warning provided by scouts stationed on the nearby high butte known as La Sentinela (the Sentinel), the villagers were “continually harassed by Navajos, Apaches, and other predatory tribes … unrelenting and fierce.” Sometime around 1750, the “enemies of the Pueblo on Alto Huachin finally prevailed, killing most of the inhabitants” and set it ablaze. It seems a small, perhaps seasonal, Spanish village on the Rio Medio endured the attack, too, for in 1751 a group of settlers petitioned the Viceroy for the right to “re-settle” the lands at “Pueblo Quemado,” suggesting they had earlier been settled there. Granted permission, they established themselves some 2 miles upstream from heights of Alto Huachin, where the village of Cordova lies today. “A few of the surviving Tanos … took refuge in a small valley two or three miles above [Cordova], where they finally died out, and the pitifully small ruins of the last stand of a one-time flourishing community” could still be seen in 1938. The little valley remains on United States Geological Survey (USGS) topo maps as “La Cañada de los Tanos” (Brown, 2012: 293–295).
But now it gets complicated. I go to the Laboratory of Anthropology in Santa Fe to check the ARMS (Archaeological Records Management System) files on the site, recorded as LA 57, “Pueblo Quemado/Cordova Pueblo,” first by H.P. Mera in 1934, and updated by John Ware and Steve Lentz in 1995. The “two large U or L shaped house mounds” signal a substantial community of several hundred rooms, the two architectural blocks suggesting “some kind of dual division of the pueblo, a moiety structure.” Ceramics collected on the surface were primarily micaceous utility wares—Tesuque, Peñasco, and Vadito types—Biscuit wares, a few Sankawi black-on-white, the latest type and which signals the end of occupation around AD 1600. Other than a few adobe-borrow pits in the house mounds, no colonial-era evidence was apparent at the site. The story of Alto Huachin seems improbable. Is this a “region without Indians,” a haunting by absence alone? (LA 57 Site Report, NMCRIS #55173, Laboratory of Anthropology). Is Alto Huachin, like Gordillo’s Fort Santa Bárbara at El Fuerte in Jujuy—an 18th century Spanish fort reimagined by locals as a site of Indian resistance to colonialism—a ruin where “clusters of rubble evoke multiple meanings,” where “ruins” affect depends not only on their physical presence but also on the socially contingent receptivity of the “bodies that encounter them?” (Gordillo, 2014: 211). El Fuerte even features nearby “Cerro Centinella” (Sentinel Mountain), from which scouts could alert defenders (whether Spanish, or Indian) of impending assault. Does Alto Huachin function as a palliative place, in which the physical absence of Indians is replaced by a frontier romance that aligns poor mestizo pobladores with their conquered indigenous neighbors and kinfolk? (Figure 1).
The rubble of “Alto Huachin” or LA 57, today, from Google Earth.
Yet, there were other veins to tap. The WPA interview reference to “Tanos” at Alto Huachin intrigued me. “Tano” was a particular sub-branch of the Tewa-speaking peoples of northern New Mexico, generally understood to reside south of the “Tano divide”—the high ridge that separated Santa Fe from what is today the Española valley to the north, where the Tewa core language group prevailed. There were no Tanos north of that ridge until after the 1693–1696 Reconquista and resettlement by don Diego de Vargas, who moved the Tanos of the Galisteo Basin (south of Santa Fe) and established them in colonially surveilled villages along the Santa Cruz river, of which the Rio Medio was a tributary. At the outbreak of the short-lived “second Pueblo revolt” in 1696, many of those peoples “fled to the mountains” and erected horse-traps and fortifications in former, 16th-century, Tewa villages along the Rio Chiquito, Rio Sarco, and the Rio Medio. Except for one group of some several hundred refugees, who migrated to the Hopi Mesas and founded what would come to be known as “Hano” (Thano), or Tewa Village on First Mesa, we have assumed the remainder was assimilated among their linguistic cousins in Tewa communities like San Ildefonso, Santa Clara, and San Juan Pueblos. (Brooks, 2016: 68–86).
Given the growing and common need for defense against Navajos and Comanches in the 18th century (only reduced by truces and treaties negotiated in the 1780s), one could reasonably imagine that some Tanos made good neighbors for Spanish colonial pobladores like those who established Cordova in the 1740s … and thus, perhaps Alto Huachin did, indeed, enjoy a short-lived second life. Whether in folk memory or archaeological survey, Indians haunt the site. Neither the absence nor the presence of Indians seems fully explicable, testimony, perhaps, to the indeterminacy of distinctions between rubble and ruins in New Mexico today.
An hour’s drive to the northwest from Alto Huachin, along NM 284/85, lies another story of rubble, or ruins. The Pueblo de Abiquiu is also bisected by a highway, with the residential settlement atop a rise to the south of the road, and the landmark Bode’s General Store to the north, with the Rio Chama, overlooked by the looming Cerro Colorado, its northern boundary. Several centuries of adobe and masonry architecture, in various stages of decay and repair, layer themselves around the plaza, where the Church of Santo Tomás el Apóstol now stands. First home for a 14th- to 16th-century Tewa village, Avéshu, it lay quiet until the 1740s, when Franciscan padre Francisco Delgado settled some 24 Catholic Hopi-Tewas on the benchland still known as the plaza del Moquis (Hopis). This small community would be augmented in 1754 by a Spanish contingent of some 57 Genízaro (military slave) families, drawn from “Indian children of war” purchased by Spanish colonists and raised up as Catholics, numbering 166 souls. Once the point of caravan-departures on the Old Spanish Trail, which linked New Mexico to California after 1829, it only attained wide renown after the artist Georgia O’Keeffe established herself in an old adobe hacienda in 1945, where she lived until 1984. Yet, the older history endures, especially as descendants of the Genízaro families seek formal federal recognition as indigenous peoples (Brooks, 2002: 128–138; Brooks, 2015: 7–9; National Public Radio (NPR), 2016).
Their quest, however just, seems unlikely to be successful, given the new federal criteria for “uninterrupted cultural persistence” from the Office of Federal Acknowledgement (Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), 2016). The Genízaros of Abiquiu, although termed “los indios genízaros del pueblo de Abiquiú” (the genízaro Indians of the Pueblo of Abiquiu) in their 1754 land grant from King Carlos V of Spain, suffered a mistranslation in English in the affirmation of their grant in the US Court of Private Land Claims as the “half-breed Indians of Abiquiu,” which began a process of “mestizoization” and “Mexicanization” that delegitimized their status as indigenous peoples and led to the expulsion of genízaro children from the Indian School in Santa Fe (Gonzales, 2017; NPR, 2016). The community continues to celebrate a Genízaro Feast Day each November, featuring dances in the plaza, oral history presentations, display of their founding legal documents, and a community meal in the parish gymnasium.
One possible avenue remains open, however, at least at the local level. Community members have been told by neighboring Pueblo elders that one way they might be recognized as kinsmen would be evidence of kivas in the subsurface archaeology of Abiquiu. These subterranean ceremonial chambers would, in the Pueblos’ estimation, indicate a deep connection that might act as a bridge across time and culture and enhance their appeal for indigenous status. Recent testing by ground-penetrating radar, however, has not yielded such evidence. Are Indians again present only through an absence?
Two years ago, however, an oral history and map-rendering session I conducted at the Pueblo de Abiquiu Library and Cultural Center opened a window. Eighty-year-old Felipe Garcia sat with me as I hand-drew a village map and solicited place-names; a remarkable experience in memory and topography. Near one edge of the village lay a deep draw, only carrying water after heavy rains. Garcia said this was the “arroyo de las estufas,” or the “gully of the ovens” in (rough) translation. The name stayed with me, however, as I recalled that early Spanish sources had termed kivas “estufas,” a misunderstanding of their function due to the presence of fire-hearths within these underground chambers. My next visit I asked my friend Virgil if he might take me to the arroyo, and we chatted about the possible connections. He recalled there being “Indian ruins” above the arroyo, and we set out to explore the various rocky benches that stepped toward the rimrock of Abiquiu mesa.
After an hour or so of scrambling around the basalt rock falls, we crested a small rise and found just that—an archaeological site of covering an acre or so of a small hill, or cerrito, with much basalt rubble and several deep circular depressions. “El cerrito de las estufas,” murmured Virgil. We spent an hour exploring the site, found a classic Tewa world-quarter shrine, several basalt boulders with petroglyphs, yet but one piece of ceramic—our only hope for on-the-spot temporal designation—which typed in the field as Wiyo black-on-white. Date range from the mid-13th to the mid-15th centuries (Figure 2).
Virgil on el cerrito de las estufas, 2016. Photograph by author.
Alas, it seemed impossible that the cerrito site had anything to share with the Genízaro history other than proximity. Almost certainly one of the several dozen Tewa settlements that ran like a chain down the Chama valley to its junction with the Rio Grande, el cerrito de las estufas adds to the depth and presence of those Indian peoples whose descendants now reside in the six communities in the “Tewa Basin”—Ohkay Owingeh (San Juan), Kha-po Owinge (Santa Clara), San Ildefonso, Pojoaque, Nambe, and Tesuque. In this case, the Indian presence in the region, however unintended, functions to make ghostly peoples likely to carry “Indian blood,” but unlikely to be formally recognized as Indian.
The stories of Alto Huachin and El Cerrito de las Estufas push us to look beneath Gordillo’s primary class distinctions as arbiters of the social work done by rubble and ruins. Working class criollos, many of whom carry “Indian blood,” see rubble more often as the quotidian detritus of a past that has little to do with their own experience other than to add to the evidence of “the ongoing injustices shaping their lives … the present fact of places destroyed” by modernization and mechanization (Gordillo, 2014: 256–257). Scholars and romantic bourgeois nationalists see rubble in the disarray of the working-class present. Ruins, on the contrary, evoke nostalgia, pathos, and allow their viewers to toy with the “fear of oblivion.” The fear may be salved through research and publication, tourism, or in the case of the mission San Francisco de Solano consecration, the burying of a time-capsule that “transcend the present and become, sometime in the future, a positive, readable trace of the past” (Gordillo, 2014: 253).
In northern New Mexico, of course, the “culture economy” depends on both the absence implicit in presence of ruins and the presence of Indians—the one provoking a romance of paradise lost, the latter a romance of the enduring Native. But these two stories twist each of these those tropes into a strange bond linking the trauma of colonialism to the survivance of the indigenous. Like Ouroboros, the serpent endlessly consuming its own tail, this haunting cycles-back on the indigenous and the colonizer alike, in that both cases serve to signify the “Indian” as somehow simultaneously absent from, but kin to, the colonists.