Forgotten Pueblos La Alianza Federal de Mercedes and the Cultural Politics of Indo-Hispano Simón Ventura Trujillo A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Washington 2013 Reading Committee: Eva Cherniavsky, Chair Chandan Reddy Ileana Rodgríguez-Silva Lauro Flores Program Authorized to Offer Degree: English Literature and Language © Copyright 2013 Simón Ventura Trujillo University of Washington Abstract Forgotten Pueblos La Alianza Federal de Mercedes and the Cultural Politics of Indo-Hispano Simón Ventura Trujillo Chair of the Supervisory Committee: Professor Eva Cherniavsky Department of English As one of the formative organizations of the Chicana/o movement in the 1960s and ’70s, La Alianza Federal de Mercedes waged a dynamic and controversial campaign in New Mexico for the recovery of Mexican and Spanish land grants that had been lost in the aftermath of the Mexican-American War in the mid-19th century. This dissertation draws from a diverse collection of archived writings and publicity materials produced by La Alianza over the span of its roughly 15 year existence and situates the movement as a rich site of cultural production. I consider these documents as an archive of subaltern history writing that countered nationalist histories that naturalize private property and sanction collective amnesia of Mexican and Native land dispossession under US sovereignty. By offering a sustained and critical engagement with La Alianza’s history writing, this dissertation examines the movement’s use of Indo-Hispano as a term invoking a past of mestizaje distinct from dominant Chicana/o imaginings of mestizaje. My analysis reveals the complex ties between Indo-Hispano and the political economy of New Mexican land grant tenure and dispossession. This project argues that Indo-Hispano re-writes the mestiza/o pasts of genízaro Indians, detribalized Plains and Pueblo Indian captives who were forcibly resettled into land grants as a buffer to protect the Spanish colonial interior in New Mexico from Plains Indian raids during the 17th and 18th centuries. In the context of genízaro Indian land grant tenure and loss, La Alianza’s textual production challenges dominant understandings of Chicana/o mestizaje offered by Chicana/o, Latina/o, and Latin American studies. Indo-Hispano insists that mestizaje ought to be considered in a much longer history of colonial hybridity and gender violence in the Americas that is not bound to the Mexican nationalist version of mestizaje appropriated by the Chicana/o movement. In these terms, this dissertation reframes La Alianza’s status in Chicano/a studies in a way that opens up the field’s relation to indigenous studies and Latin American studies. From this perspective, I link Indo-Hispano to genízaro land tenure and loss in order to recuperate an alternative imaginary for indigenous land reclamation and mestizo/a hybridity in the Americas. I unearth this imaginary by reading Indo-Hispano alongside an array of multi-ethnic border narratives that center linkages between mestizaje and indigenous territoriality across the Americas. In other words, my focus on the writing of Indo-Hispano is also about rendering visible cognate indigenous modes of telling the past and reclaiming the land that inhere within a multiplicity of borderland positions. In particular, I read Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead and Ana Castillo’s So Far From God as texts that give me a language to resignify Indo- Hispano’s transnational, hybridized, and coalitional nature. At stake here is making the case for how the writing of Indo-Hispano converges with the temporalities of transnational indigenous land reclamation struggles of our contemporary moment. 1 For Ventura Chávez Cruzita Chávez Gail B. Trujillo Jesse O. Baros 2 Acknowledgments This dissertation is a product of labors, struggles, and insurrections that began way before my time. Acknowledging all of the people, voices, and insights that have informed this project is daunting and very necessary. I first and foremost would like to thank my mother, Gail B. Trujillo, my grandparents, Ventura and Cruzita Chávez, and my sister, Michelle Trujillo. Michelle has put up with my antics all of her life, and I am inspired by her generosity. My mother and grandparents lived the stories that I write about, and this dissertation would not be possible without their hard, tireless work and the dignity of their struggles. Their lifelong and unconditional love and support has made an indelible imprint on each and every word you will read here. I want to acknowledge the love and support offered by my late, great uncle Jesse O. Baros. He wholeheartedly helped to nurture, finance, and support my sister and me in moments when we needed it most. My father, Pedro Trujillo, has provided invaluable love and support during my graduate school career, and I thank him for the sense of curiosity he brings to my work. My graduate committee at the University of Washington (UW) performed the miraculous work of transforming what initially appeared as my scattered family memories and stories into a legitimate intellectual inquiry. My chair, Eva Cherniavksy, is a model mentor. When I was first making sense of this project, one of her first suggestions was to read Almanac of the Dead. Were it not for her suggestion, this project would not have happened. Her generosity, intellectual rigor, and commitment to critical practice are unsurpassed. Chandan Reddy’s brilliance is the reason I came to the UW for graduate study. His warmth, radiant intellect, and critical commitment to social justice provide lifelong inspiration for my thinking. Ileana Rodríguez-Silva has provided unwavering and vibrant guidance and support in helping to make sense of the misfit nature of La 3 Alianza. My thinking has been made all the more rich by her enthusiasm, sense of humor, and dedication to anti-imperialist social history practice. Lauro Flores offered a generous and sympathetic ear to my work since our first meeting. I remain grateful and motivated by our conversations on the bounty and unpredictability of genealogical investigation. I was also blessed to work with an amazing cohort of graduate students at the UW. The cultural organizing I did with the Race/Knowledge Project taught me two treasured lessons: the personal is political, and the university is ours for the dismantling. I am grateful for the love, support, and critical intimacy of Kate Boyd, Jason Morse, Sooja Kelsey, Sydney Fonteyn Lewis, Jed Murr, Christian Ravela, Suzanne Schmidt, and Pacharee Sudhinaraset. Multiple drafts of this manuscript were read by Eva Cherniavsky’s dissertation group—aka “diss group.” I would like to thank Curtis Hisayasu and Andrew Rose for their repeated engagement with my writing. I have been fortunate enough to be a part of an emergent cohort of borderlands scholars at the UW from a variety of disciplines, thanks largely to the work of Maria Elena García and José Antonio Lucero. I am immensely grateful for the intellectual, personal, and institutional support they have provided me. I would also like to thank Marisa Duarte, Molly Todd, Raj Chetty, Michelle Habell-Pallán, Juan Guerra, and Dian Million. I am inspired by their insights, humor, curiosity, and critical integrity. Of course, insights and breakthroughs come from unexpected places and meetings, and I would like to thank Patricia Trujillo at Northern New Mexico College for her formative thoughts on this work. This work has also been nurtured by friendships old and new. My best friend and brother from another mother, Andrés Aceves, has been there since I was a lanky teenager who loved hip hop and reading. Sean Tollison, Ben Jimenez, and Clay Holtzman provided much needed chill sessions when times got crazy. Life in Seattle changed when Michael Viola arrived on the scene, 4 and his work and life has established new meaning to the labor of community building. Sergio Casillas offered no shortage of conversation and critical ponderings of the racial politics of Seattle. As this project was entering its final stages, Reies López Tijerina and his wife Esperanza generously hosted my family and me in their home in El Paso. It is an honor to build upon the unfinished legacy of his life’s work, and I thank them both for their hospitality. I would not have made it to graduate school without the guidance and support of my mentors at the University of New Mexico, Edward Desantis and Hector Torres. Desantis played a formative role in fostering my curiosity about the written word. I remain forever grateful for his patience, wisdom, and generosity of spirit. I met Hector during my last semester at UNM, and he completely upended my intellectual world. He taught me what it means to think in the face of death, how to live when confronted with unrelenting absence. He was a friend, ally, troublemaker, and tireless advisor in the labor of deconstruction. He was taken too quickly from this world, but his spirit permeates every word here. In the end, nothing could have prepared me for meeting the love of my life, the one and only Pacharee Sudhinaraset. Interlocutor and co-conspirator to the end. There is no beauty beyond her heart and mind. She inspires me to love, work, and live better. Her spirit, kindness, and love bring adventure and wonder to every day of my life. 5 Contents Introduction The Almanac of Indo-Hispano: La Alianza Federal de Mercedes and the Writing of Mestizaje in New Mexico 6 Chapter One Mi lucha por la tierra and the Fugitive Textuality of La Alianza Federal de Mercedes 30 Chapter Two Cartographies of Forgetting and Futurity: Indo-Hispano, Chicana/o Mestizaje, and Almanac of the Dead 93 Chapter Three “U.S.A. is Trespassing in New Mexico”: La Alianza Federal de Mercedes and the Subaltern Historiography of Indo-Hispano 130 Chapter Four “Remember the Times When It was the Woman Who Did the Building”: El Grito del Norte, So Far From God, and the Defeudalizing Indigeneity of Indo-Hispano Mestizaje 169 Bibliography 224 6 Introduction The Almanac of Indo-Hispano: La Alianza Federal de Mercedes and the Writing of Mestizaje in New Mexico Autobiography is usually thought of as seizing the authority of authenticity.