How la Raza became invisible

Mabel, and the noble and ignoble savages

MABEL DODGE LUJAN manifested an iconic narrative of her time when she married Tony Lujan from Taos Pueblo. Anglo American men had been marrying into Hispanic families for decades, assuming land titles and capital and changing the nature of social relations and local economies.

Mabel’s marriage signified another chapter in Taos ethnic relations. She lived in a real-life Rousseau’s myth of the Noble Savage, celebrated by Aldous Huxley who was a member of her clique. Hers was THE marriage in the society of her time, featured in newspapers from Taos’s El Crepusculo to the New York Times.

My mother’s marriage to a self-identified Mexican, is an example of the distinction between “noble” and “ignoble” savages. Mother’s family had nowhere near the Dodge fortune, but she was a member of the small Anglo artsy clique, the daughter of upper-class white southerners. My father was poor, but from a family of educators and a business owner. But the day after their modest wedding no Anglo OR Spanishspeaking person congratulated them, not on the plaza or in the drugstore. Their marriage was unmentionable. This says a lot about the complexity of racism in New Mexico and the depth of feelings surrounding it.

There is a little story inside the bigger story of adobe architecture that illustrates how cultural appropriation makes authentic culture invisible. The story of the “kiva” fireplace is a classic illustration of how appropriation erases the truth.

“Kiva” is the only word for a signature New Mexican architectural detail so quintessentially typical that it competes with howling coyotes wearing bandannas and red chiles hanging from ladders that never reach the roof. No hotel room or “Pueblo-style” house

can be without one.

However the term is historically ridiculous, beyond politically incorrect, it is offensive and is a perfect example of how cultural appropriation impoverishes, degrades and hurts – and gets it all wrong to boot.

For starters. Perhaps desecration of the sacred is the worst of colonization’s many forms of violence. A real kiva fireplace is something so sacred that, not I and/or any other non-tribal member, will ever see one. Kivas are underground chambers in the Pueblos, equivalent to churches, closely guarded, in which secret ceremonies are conducted.

With a wisdom tempered in the painful fires of two conquests and a revolution, everything associated with Pueblo religion is shielded by an impenetrable wall of silence and secrecy.

The term kiva fireplace is used by architectural historians, journalists, novelists, advertisers, architects and contractors who all failed to see what pre-conquest ruins make obvious: Kiva fireplaces had no chimneys, the fire pit was near the center of the room, smoke exited through a hole in the ceiling, which was also the only door and required climbing down a ladder from the roof with smoke in your eyes.

But the impoverishment caused by the colonizer’s eye does not end there. Anglo architectural historians could not see that the fireplaces were built by women, and that it was women who did the very specific and specialized work of continually maintaining, embellishing and remodeling the whole architecture. Known as enjarradoras, they were the interior and exterior plasterers. Besides all this, they passed on this body of knowledge by oral tradition and kept 1,000 years of architecture standing.

Every spring, grandmothers like mine conscripted children to haul water, cut straw and mix mud. Walls were washed with sheepskins and fresh clay, and the linoleum that covered old mud floors was puddled with water, straw and the prints of little bare feet. Exhausted children sleeping like stones dreamed of shovels, of the well pulley shrieking as two little girls pulled handover-hand on the rope, and then staggered, with a bucket of water between them, back to the women, rags, bonnets and scarves on their heads, mudding the walls with their bare hands.

All the other outsider-contrived myths that together comprise New Mexico’s image obscure rather than illuminate the reality. The two older communities in Northern New Mexico have been historically traumatized and continue to be in ways that Anglo migrants have not. Whatever personal hardships our Anglo neighbors have survived, they have not been colonized as a people, they have not lost their land, been enslaved and their community has not been subjected to systematic genocide, mass incarceration, ongoing police killings and racial violence – which all communities of color, not just blacks – experience on a daily basis.

What you just read is a window into the hearts, the blood memory and bones of all the Hispanic and Native strangers you pass on the street. And it is just a peek into the grand, sweeping, complicated, tragic, bloody, beautiful, violent story of those of us who have ancestors buried here.