Larger Than Life: New Mexico in the Twentieth Century (review)

2007 ◽  
Vol 111 (1) ◽  
pp. 109-110
Author(s):  
Jon Hunner
Keyword(s):  
2021 ◽  
Vol 52 (3) ◽  
pp. 259-280
Author(s):  
William S Kiser

Abstract This article explores the continuities of forced labor in the Southwest, where peonage and the partido system lasted for more than a century after the Thirteenth Amendment outlawed slavery, and places it within the broader context of modern global slavery. Debt peonage and peasant sharecropping—known locally as the partido—are usually classified as two different forms of unfree labor, but in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century Southwest they had much in common and were oftentimes mutually reinforcing. Through the legal and cultural intricacies of the partido system, thousands of landless Hispanos in the northern half of New Mexico and southern reaches of Colorado worked full-time in exchange for a small share of the annual wool harvest. Many of those same men became debt-bound to the tiny percentage of wealthy families who owned the sheep herds and grazing ranges. Through these means, partidarios (sheep renters) lost much if not all of their autonomy and became, to varying degrees depending on the disposition of their creditor and benefactor, debt peons.


Author(s):  
Rachel St. John

This chapter describes how ranchers, miners, investors, laborers, railroad executives, and innumerable economic actors integrated the border into an emerging transnational economy and began to create binational communities on the boundary line. With the completion of the first transborder rail line—brought on by the joining of the Sonora Railway and the Arizona and New Mexico Railroad at the international boundary line—ranchers and miners secured an easy way to move stock and ore to markets. As more people realized this, the borderlands experienced nothing short of a capitalist revolution. The capitalist development of the borderlands would, in turn, spur the creation of an array of new transborder ties. By the early twentieth century, the border has become a point of connection and community in the midst of an emerging capitalist economy and the center of a transborder landscape of property and profits.


2015 ◽  
Vol 72 (4) ◽  
pp. 529-547
Author(s):  
Ellen McCracken

In the summer of 1924, townspeople recount, 14-year-old Manuel Chávez built models of colonial New Mexico mission churches in the dirt outside Our Lady of Guadalupe Church in the village of Peña Blanca. He was staying with the Franciscan friars after expressing his desire to enter the seminary, where he would become the first native New Mexico Hispano to be ordained a Franciscan priest in the centuries since the Spanish colonization. Still a boy, but one who was about to embark on a life-changing path, the small missions he playfully constructed in the dirt and staunchly protected foretold the strategy of rematerialization that would characterize his future: he would become a pioneering Franciscan historian who organized and interpreted the vast collection of Catholic Church documents from the colonial period in New Mexico through the twentieth century. The author of two dozen books and over 600 shorter works, Fray Angélico Chávez (1910–1996) was a visual artist, literary figure, historian, genealogist, translator, and church restorer—one of New Mexico's foremost twentieth-century intellectuals.


2011 ◽  
Vol 80 (3) ◽  
pp. 430-467 ◽  
Author(s):  
Linda C. Noel

This article focuses on how people of Mexican descent fit within the definition of "American" during the early twentieth century. It argues that during the final years of debate over Arizona and New Mexico statehood, nativos (U.S.-born people of Mexican descent), Mexicans (immigrants from Mexico), and Anglos developed and promoted strategies of pluralism and marginalization for incorporating people of Mexican descent into the nation. Pluralists worked to ensure that nativos in New Mexico would become full members of the United States as Spanish Americans, while Anglos promoting marginalization strove to limit people of Mexican descent in Arizona to second-class citizenship. Although both territories became states in 1912, the two strategies resulted in very different consequences for people of Mexican descent and provided two very different models for how they could be considered American.


Author(s):  
Kerry F. Thompson ◽  
Ronald H. Towner

The dominant anthropological and archaeological narrative of “Navajo” culture is that upon entering the northwestern New Mexico in the sixteenth century, bands of Athapaskan hunter-gatherers began an acculturative process that led them to adopt and assimilate Pueblo, Spanish, Mexican, and American cultural institutions. The anthropological and archaeological concept “Navajo,” created through Western scholarship by non-Diné, does not align with Diné worldview or conceptions of self and history. Instead, it reaffirms Western scholarship as legitimate, while it marginalizes and brands Diné history as “alternative,” or as not really history. A review of theories that underlie Navajo archaeological literature reveals that the genesis of the erroneous tenets about Diné culture stem from late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century ideas that researchers have only recently begun to re-examine.


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