Cuartocentenario

Published with permission from the Santa Fe New Mexican

A Spanish View of History: Spain’s Legacy is not an Issue of Race

By Antonio López – April 24, 1998
Antonio López is a staff writer for Pasatiempo

In front of the Oñate Monument and Visitors Center in Alcalde, just north of Española, the flags of Mexico, Spain, New Mexico and the United States flutter in the wind. This is the first clue that the Oñate center is not simply about New Mexico’s first Spanish settlers, but instead represents its multifaceted cultural heritage.

At the center’s helm is Juan Estevan Arellano—photographer, sculptor, award-winning author, and lately a Northern New Mexican cultural ambassador to Spain and Mexico, where he has traveled as part of 400th anniversary of the state’s first Spanish settlement.

Born and raised in Embudo, Arellano is part of the Northern Rio Grande’s cultural fabric, advocating and writing on sustainable economic development by promoting agricultural practices introduced by the Spanish. A book he wrote on acequias, the rural system for irrigation developed by the Moors and brought by the Spanish, will be published by the University of New Mexico Press.

He was interviewed in his office at the Oñate Monument and Visitors Center, which he calls an “Indo-Hispano cultural center in the heart of Hispano culture in the Española Valley, where Don Juan de Oñate established the first settlement of Españoles-Mexicanos.” An incident involving the center’s Oñate statue, which had its foot cut of by anonymous protesters, has drawn attention to Oñate’s actions at Acoma Pueblo. There, as punishment for the pueblo’s attack on Spanish soldiers, Oñate ordered the right feet cut off of 24 young men.

Question: Why do you describe the Oñate settlers as “Españoles-Mexicanos,” instead of just Spanish?

Answer: The term Spanish has been inaccurate, historically. The people who came with Oñate were not all directly from Spain. A lot of them were mestizos (mixed blood) from Mexico; there were people from the Canary Islands, there were some from France. It was a mixed group. It is very naive for people to claim they are totally Spanish, and that they are blue-blooded. When you look at Spain, it was a very mixed country in the 1400s. Almost everyone had crossed through Spain at one point or another… When people refer to themselves as pure Spanish, I think they refer more to what the Castillian king or queen were, who were engaged in the reconquista (the movement to rid the Iberian peninsula of Moors and Jews).

Question: Why do you refer the Oñate Monument and Visitors Center as an “Indo-Hispano” cultural center?

Answer: Oñate himself was married to a mestiza, a descendent of (Aztec king) Montectzuma. It was already a very mixed group that came up to New Mexico. There were a lot of Mexican Indians that came with them. So what we have here in Northern New Mexico is really an Indo-Hispano, a mestizo population. We all have Native American blood here.

Question: What do you think is the legacy of the Spanish colonialists?

Answer: I think there are a lot of positive things that have happened. The whole mestizaje that was created here is something that is totally new. We are a mixture of a lot of different bloods and cultures, but I think we lean, in a lot of ways, more towards our Spanish roots, but we don’t abandon our Native American roots either. But one of the issues I see is that Native Americans don’t claim us as being half-brothers.

Question: Is it fair to focus on what Oñate did at Acoma?

Answer: You have to realize it was an act of war. There was a declaration of war between the Spanish Crown and the native population at the time. Look at what this country did to the people in Vietnam. We don’t have a very good record in this country to try to go back 400 years and say look what Oñate did to the Indians. At least here in New Mexico what you have is that the Native American culture has survived because of the Spanish who came here. Look at the East Coast where the Anglos arrived, or in the Southeast where the French came. There are no remnants of Native American cultures there. The only reason it’s here is because at least these people mixed blood.

Question: What is your take on the cutting off of the foot from the Oñate statue?

Answer: A lot of people have said just leave off the foot so that they can make a statement. But what statement? The ones who were yelling the most were the Anglos. It was not so much the Native Americans, it was the Anglos. They don’t say anything about Kit Carson. Kit Carson probably killed more Indians than Oñate or a lot of the Spanish conquistadores did. I think you have to find a middle ground between the extremes. It has become a clichè about the feet cut off the Acoma by Oñate. The ones who are fueling that debate are the Anglos. What we are seeing now is that the Anglos are trying to revive the Black Legend. They are trying to create the schism between Native Americans and the Indo-Hispanos, so they can exploit it. I know the (foot getting cut off the statute), even though I can’t prove it, I know it wasn’t done by Native Americans or Hispanos, it was done by some extreme environmental group. I think the environmentalists are the ones responsible because they don’t want some of the things we are doing here at the center in relation to the land grants and water rights, are things they are trying to appropriate for their agenda so that they can put a stop to the land grant legislation being introduced by Bill Redmond.

Question: What do you think is the role of history in discussing this anniversary?

Answer: What I’d like to see happen in 1998 would be a discussion of the history of New Mexico. I think the history of New Mexico has to be re-written, and it has to be written from the point of view, not of the Anglos, but of the Indo-Hispanos and the Native Americans, because we have never had any role in writing our history. We have been denied that historical process. When we go to school, we are told that our ancestors came from the East. Well, I don’t know of many Martinezes, Arellanos or Archuletas who had any ancestors who landed at Plymouth Rock.

Question: When you traveled to Spain, what did you discover about their interest in this anniversary?

Answer: They want to help out the people from here, because they feel that we are related, and that they owe the people of New Mexico something… Some of them felt bad because some of the descendants from the New World never returned. So they were surprised to see 400 years later, where we were. You can imagine how a mother felt when her son left, never to be seen again. Now we go back and say, “Here we are, the descendants of those people who left Spain, starting in 1492, clear up to the late 1600s.” It was a surprise to a lot of Spanish people to realize that we had survived here in isolation for 400 years. We still retain a lot of the culture, the language and a lot of the same values—the orgullo (pride).