New Mexico Musings

 

Sangre de Cristo Mountains, Santa Fe, New Mexico.

In 900, Native Americans first settled the land of the oldest US state capital, Santa Fe. Pueblo villages rooted there in 1050-1150. In 1607, Spanish soldiers and politicians claimed the city for New Spain. For eighty years, Spain sent soldiers and priests to suppress and replace Pueblo culture with Spanish culture and Catholicism. In 1680, the Pueblo Indians revolted and pushed out the Spanish colonists. Twelve years passed. The Spanish returned and re-conquered the territory. Violent cultural conflicts quieted in a peaceful surrender by Santa Fe’s original inhabitants. But the culture wars continued. Native crops and ways yielded to European priorities to the detriment of indigenous culture and faith.

 

Cathedral Basilica of St. Francis of Assisi from the Museum of Contemporary Native Arts.

The city’s ghosts are palpable. The layers of bones that lie dormant beneath Santa Fe include a burial ground of indigenous origin and the remains of slaughtered Native, Spanish and Mexican people. During World War II, Santa Fe held 4,555 men of Japanese heritage imprisoned. The buildings are gone, but the scars remain. These men were taken without warning from their families. They were Buddhist and Christian leaders in their communities, scholars, teachers, businessmen, sons, husbands and fathers. Their forgotten internment adds another layer of injustice perpetrated on Santa Fe’s soil by the demon of ideological conviction harnessed with fear.

Parking lot in Santa Fe. Click here for a short PBS video on the internment.

Santa Fe, which means “holy faith” in Spanish, reminds me of Bethlehem where a succession of conquerors of divergent cultures and faiths each added a strata of architectural dominion. Each victor built atop its predecessor’s construction to mark homage or destruction of the original cave where Jesus was born. Somehow, despite this architectural jousting, the original idea that human beings are meant to have a divine origin remained. Even when the buildings were razed, a robust oral tradition kept alive the knowledge of the starlit cradle.

 

Sun and wind with prayer flags at Stardreaming.

It took me several days and many miles of walking around Santa Fe and its dry riverbeds to grasp how I could approach its hallowed ground with the baggage of my mostly European ancestry. Great Spirit speaks through the land, the power of the stones, and the clarity of desert light. City building codes harmonize construction with Pueblo nuance. Local inhabitants echo and beckon a common ancient origin through art. They honor those of Spain who brought peace, those from Mexico who brought justice and the contemporary Native artists that recall their ancestors and look to build a wise future for all children. There is a lively Asian community.

 

"Woodland Child in Gas Mask" by Naomi Bebo. (MoCNA)

The small joys and deep suffering of thousands, in graves known only to the ghosts, have penetrated and emerge from the earth who is in constant conversation with the sun. Shadows project ochre, sienna and umber. Through glossy thorns, cactus speaks in rosy yellow blooms and wine red hips. In the creek bed, aspen shimmers gold against viridian pine boughs. Before tumbleweed rolls from its earthbound roots, its mustard blossoms render seeds that draw birds into its wiry arms. The birds feast. The tumbleweed releases them back to the sky in freedom.

 

Before the feast.

Perhaps in our swift passage through this life we can only hope to have the faith of a tumbleweed or to grasp peace with the conviction the eagle summons from a shaman to fly. 

"Dream of Flight" by Lincoln Fox. (Albuquerque International Sunport)

 

The Media and Me—Are the Times A Changin’?

That thing behind my back in 1974 was called the One-Eyed Monster.

Did you read Orwell’s 1984 before the year 1984? Did you see Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey before 2001? 

What were your top seven media events through high school?

Here are a few of mine:

1. November 1963: Kennedy Assassinated

Watched the funeral on black-and-white (monochromatic cathode ray tube), analog television (TV) in a small apartment in Mineola, on Long Island, NY. Cried for three days. I was in kindergarten. Launched my mistrust of the human species.

2. Circa 1965: Vietnam War televised

Initially watched on black-and-white TV, then in living color every night on the evening news in Westfield, NJ until we moved to France in 1971. Horrifying.

3. April 1968: Martin Luther King Assassinated

Listened to a recording of Dr. Martin Luther King delivering “I Have a Dream” via record player in my fifth grade class in Westfield, NJ. Inspired with hope listening to his speech. Devastated by his death. Record players were machines with cords that plugged into the wall to access electricity. The electrical power spun a turntable upon which a disk rotated. A needle with a diamond point followed grooves in the disk as it turned to transmit recorded sound into a speaker. This particular disk was of floppy rubber and square in shape. It was from inside a National Geographic magazine our fifth grade teacher had brought to class.

4. Summer 1968: 2001: A Space Odyssey

Saw it in color at a movie theater in downtown Westfield, NJ with my dad and a couple of friends. Trippy. Seeing color on the big screen was remarkable at the time. I don’t believe we had color TV yet.

5. July 21, 1969: Neil Armstrong walks on the moon

Saw it on black-and-white TV in an isolated rental cottage in the woods in Cape Cod, Mass. Amazed. Watched the next six Apollo lift-offs over the next few years back home in NJ. They were a big deal. Whatever we were doing, we would stop, gather around the TV and wait for the countdown.

6. 1969: "In the Year 2525"

This song was #1 on the Billboard charts. That meant wherever you went in the US, if a radio was turned on, you probably heard this song. I thought this was the anthem of my generation at the time. I was ten. Transistor radios were portable and there were radios in cars, too. Billboard was the name of a magazine in the 1930s that first published a list of songs ranking them by popularity. I had to look that up; I wasn’t around at that time despite what my kids think.

(1971-73: Lived in France. Read books mostly, newspaper for news.)

7. 1974: Nixon resigned on TV

Read Orwell’s 1984 (written in 1949). The year 1984 seemed impossibly far away. I wasn’t sure I’d live until then as I reeled from the culture shock of US high school. We were living in Denver. Nixon’s resignation in Washington, D.C. seemed as far away as 1984 because the political shift in Washington did not stop cowboys from bullying me in Colorado at the time.

As a child, I thought Civilization had rules to guide people so we could work together to create a better world. In high school, I observed that lots of people didn’t follow rules either because they had different ideas or because they were mean. I subsequently decided that human beings collectively constructed Culture.

Now, I seek the inner essence within individuals. This spiritual core has more endearing and enduring significance than any collective. I am grateful that no single hegemonic culture or civilization can possibly contain us as a species. I just hope we have enough wisdom not to wipe out ourselves and the planet.

~*~