Latest / Tales From Aztlantis / Throwback: New Mexican Spanish w/ Rob Martinez!

Transcript

Throwback: New Mexican Spanish w/ Rob Martinez! · Tales From Aztlantis

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_02: This episode is sponsored by Archeo Gato Tours.
• 0:04
  SPEAKER_02: Want to dig deeper into Mexico's indigenous past and present?
• 0:09
  SPEAKER_02: Allow Archeogato Tours to customize your Yucatan adventure.
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_02: Archeo Gato works hand in hand with local indigenous guides to provide a tour that is entertaining, educational, and beneficial to the local community.
• 0:27
  SPEAKER_02: For an adventure like no other, check out Archeogato.com.
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_02: That's A-R-K-E-O-G-A-T-O.com.
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_02: Or just follow the link in the show notes.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_02: Now, on with the show.
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_05: You must excuse me.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_05: This isn't an easy enough.
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_05: But you've learned a lesson.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_05: A lesson in honesty.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_05: Honesty to yourself, honesty to others.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_05: Lesson must be in good step on the money.
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_04: Honesty is the best honesty.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_02: We are your hosts, Curly Tlapoyawa.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_01: And Ruben Ariano, also known as Tlacatica.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_02: Today we're gonna switch it up a little bit.
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_02: We are joined by the New Mexico state historian Rob Martinez.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_02: State historian Rob Martinez is a native New Mexican born and raised in Albuquerque.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_02: A graduate of the University of New Mexico, Rob has presented papers and lectures on his research at history conferences throughout the southwestern United States.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_02: Mr.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_02: Martinez is also a folk musician, performing and promoting New Mexican musical traditions for the past 20 years with his brother Lorenzo and their father Roberto Martinez in the group Los Reyes de Albuquerque.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_02: And today we're going to be talking about a subject near and dear to my heart.
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_02: The myth of New Mexican Spanish.
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_02: Perhaps the most pervasive myth among New Mexican Spanish speakers is that New Mexican Spanish is an archaic and pure form of Spanish.
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_02: This idea comes from the misconception that New Mexico existed in a continuous state of isolation, separated from the rest of New Spain and the later Mexican Republic by hundreds of miles and for hundreds of years, causing its colonial inhabitants to retain the language of 16th century Spain.
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_02: This idealized vision of Spanish purity is repeated so often and with such near-religious zeal, it is simply accepted as fact in many circles.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_02: However, this romanticized version of New Mexican Spanish simply does not exist.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_02: For this episode, I will rely a great deal on the works The Spanish Language of New Mexico in Southern Colorado, a linguistic atlas by Garland D.
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_02: Bills and Nettie V.
• 3:39
  SPEAKER_02: Hill, as well as the PhD dissertation, Archaism and Innovation: A Diachronic Perspective on New Mexico Spanish by Juan Antonio Trujillo.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_02: Now, if you've not done so already, I encourage our listeners to go back and check out episode three of this podcast titled New Mexico Has a Hispano White Nationalism Problem.
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_02: In that episode, we examine the Hispano attempts to erase their mixed-blood indigenous ancestry and recast themselves as the descendants of noble Spanish explorers.
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_02: It is an excellent episode, if I do say myself, and will provide more context to today's topic.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_02: Interestingly, one of the main sources of the archaic New Mexican Spanish myth is not a historical document nor an ethnographic or linguistic study, but rather the 1976 novel The Milagro Beanfield War by John Nichols.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_02: This book, which was adapted into a 1988 film directed by Robert Redford and starring Ruben Blades and Sonia Braga, helped to reinforce the pseudo-historical narrative of New Mexico Spanish in the following excerpt.
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_03: Acheco could not stand the way Onofre, reading aloud in Spanish, pronounced his C's and Zs.
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_03: He pronounced them with the Castilian th sound, that is, with a lisp, an affectation peculiar to many of the Miracle Valley's old timers, whereas it could not be found farther south in Mexico.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_03: The reason for this being that Onofres and Seferino Pacheco's ancestors had come from Spain four centuries before, traveled to this godforsaken place in the high Rockies, and then been cut off from civilization for 300 years, thus maintaining many of the purities of their Spanish language and in their Spanish customs.
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_01: Claims like Hey Curly Surge, you gonna ruin this for me, this movie?
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_01: I mean this movie.
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, spoiler alert.
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_03: My family's in the movie, by the way.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_03: Really?
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, the the scene in the big house where there's a mariachi playing and they're kind of giving the owners dirty looks.
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_03: That's my brother Lorenzo and my dad's group, Los Reyes.
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_02: Right on.
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_02: Well, see, now you have more of a reason to watch the movie, Reuben.
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_02: And me too now, I gotta go back and watch it.
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_02: Claims like these are repeated daily by the Hispanos of northern New Mexico.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_02: However, these claims are not accurate and are rooted in a pseudo-historical reimagining of New Mexican history that seeks to erase the mixed-blood indigenous character of the original New Mexican colonists, who, along with Mesoamerican indigenous warriors, farmers, and servants, made up the majority of the colonists.
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_03: As Juan Antonio Trujillo notes, despite the New Mexico Hispanics' insistence, the majority of the original colonist groups were not of European-Spanish origin, but rather mestizo immigrants of modest means recruited along the colonial highway leading north from Mexico City.
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_02: To cling to the Spanish myth is to ignore the complexity of New Mexico's colonial era history, which in reality is quite different and far more fascinating than any notion of archaic Spanish purity can offer.
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_02: The Indios Mexicanos, that made up the bulk of New Spain's northward expansion, brought with them many rich linguistic and cultural traditions, the impacts of which are felt to this very day.
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_02: These Indios Mexicanos spoke a variety of Mesoamerican languages, but the Nahuat language of the Aztecs would have the largest impact on the way Spanish is spoken in New Mexico.
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_02: Nahuat language loanwords, damn it.
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_02: Nahuatl language loanwords are known as Aztequismos, and their prominence in New Mexican Spanish is a testament to a Mesoamerican legacy that mainstream New Mexican historians often ignore.
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_02: It is quite possible that this historical amnesia is intentional, stemming from the fact that the mere presence of these Aztequismos represents an inconvenient truth, dispelling the myth of New Mexico's Spanish purity.
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_02: As noted by Bills and Vigil.
• 8:19
  SPEAKER_03: It is the contribution from Nahuatl, the language of the Aztec Indians of central Mexico, that provides the most palpable demonstration that New Mexican Spanish is really Mexican Spanish, not pure Castilian Spanish.
• 8:38
  SPEAKER_02: So prevalent is the impact of Nahuatl on New Mexican Spanish that in many cases commonplace Spanish-language words are ignored in favor of their Nahuatl based equivalent.
• 8:50
  SPEAKER_02: Examples of this are cuate, twins, chapulin, grasshopper, tocayo, namesake, zacate, grass, popote, straw, soquete, mud, jicara, bowl, and tecolote, owl.
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_02: Two prominent New Mexican neighborhoods bear Nahuat names, Atrisco and Albuquerque from Atlishco, or facing the water, and Analco in Santa Fe, which means on the other side of the water in Nahuatl.
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_02: Situated across the street from the historic San Miguel Church in Santa Fe is a plaque commemorating the establishment of Analco by Mesoamerican settlers.
• 9:29
  SPEAKER_02: Of course, the most obvious example of Nahuatl influence is the very name of the state itself, Nuevo México.
• 9:37
  SPEAKER_02: The name is a combination of two words, the Spanish Nuevo meaning new, and the Nahuatl word México, or México, meaning the place of Mexitli.
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_02: The Codex Chimalpain references the search for a Yanquique Mexico, a literal New Mexico, located to the north, where the ancestors of the Mexica may have originated before settling in the Valley of Anahuac.
• 10:05
  SPEAKER_02: It was this search for a Yanquique Mexico that motivated the northward expansion of New Spain, a task largely carried out by Mesoamerican auxiliaries labeled simply as Indios Mexicanos in colonial documents.
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_02: Now it's worth noting that the Mesoamerican legacy of New Mexico and southern Colorado also lives on in the genetic imprint of their Chicano populations.
• 10:30
  SPEAKER_02: On principle, I do not use labels such as Hispano or the more culturally confused, in my opinion, Indo-Hispano, popularized by the millennialist cult leader Reyes Lopez de Jarina, but that's another discussion altogether, and an episode we will be having in the future.
• 10:49
  SPEAKER_02: Genetic studies reveal that the average Chicano living in the San Luis Valley is at least one-third genetically indigenous, with an overwhelming majority of that native blood coming from their mother's DNA.
• 11:02
  SPEAKER_02: Despite this, Hispanics living in New Mexico and southern Colorado tend to reject any indigenous identity and desperately cling to the myth of Spanish purity.
• 11:12
  SPEAKER_02: Now, I'm not suggesting that it's impossible to find archaic expressions in New Mexican Spanish.
• 11:18
  SPEAKER_02: However, this is common in all regional dialects of any language, and it's certainly not unique to New Mexico, nor is the existence of a handful of archaic terms proof of some magical connection to an ancient and pure form of Spanish, unknown anywhere else.
• 11:37
  SPEAKER_02: The reality is, the Spanish spoken in New Mexico and Southern Colorado is a blend of Spanish, Nahuatl, North American indigenous words, regional slang, English, and even words in Arabic.
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_02: The idea that New Mexican Spanish is pure anything, quote unquote, is patently absurd.
• 11:59
  SPEAKER_02: The influence and contributions made by Mesoamerican people to the state of New Mexico and southern Colorado have been ignored for far too long.
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_02: A few years ago, I was pleased to discover that the Albuquerque Museum unveiled an exhibit depicting Mesoamericans as part of the settling of New Mexico.
• 12:18
  SPEAKER_02: Hopefully, this represents a coming shift in the way New Mexico's history is presented, and the presence of Mesoamerican people will finally be fully recognized.
• 12:28
  SPEAKER_02: Regardless, Mesoamericans have left an indelible mark on New Mexico, and totacho, our way of talking, remains.
• 12:40
  SPEAKER_02: So nice.
• 12:42
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 12:43
  SPEAKER_02: And thank you, Rob, for contributing your reading and vocal skills.
• 12:51
  SPEAKER_02: There you go.
• 12:52
  SPEAKER_02: That's so thank you for for coming on.
• 12:55
  SPEAKER_03: Thank you for having me.
• 12:56
  SPEAKER_03: It's good to be here.
• 12:57
  SPEAKER_03: This is an uh amazing topic.
• 13:00
  SPEAKER_03: It's one that keeps us, well, talking a lot, right?
• 13:04
  SPEAKER_03: I think it's it's a very important it's important to talk about this.
• 13:09
  SPEAKER_02: So you are the New Mexico state historian.
• 13:13
  SPEAKER_02: So what does like what does a state historian do?
• 13:18
  SPEAKER_02: What does your um your job encompass?
• 13:20
  SPEAKER_03: Well, um, I have a master's degree from UNM in Latin American history with an emphasis on New Mexico.
• 13:28
  SPEAKER_03: Um, I've also worked for the Sephardic Project of New Mexico, researching in places like Mexico, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Spain, Italy, and France.
• 13:39
  SPEAKER_03: And then I was a teacher of high school history for 10 years, uh, teaching New Mexico history, world history.
• 13:45
  SPEAKER_03: That was an incredible education for me, not just my students.
• 13:50
  SPEAKER_03: And then I became the deputy state historian.
• 13:54
  SPEAKER_03: Uh, I did that for six years, and then for uh two years, right now is about my anniversary, two-year anniversary being state historian.
• 14:02
  SPEAKER_03: And the the division of the Office of the State Historian is at the New Mexico State Records Center and Archives in Santa Fe.
• 14:08
  SPEAKER_03: And the mission of the Office of the State Historian is to preserve and promote New Mexico history and culture through original research, through presentations, education, outreach, and to uh help uh broaden uh uh understanding of our state's history for our state agencies and citizens alike.
• 14:31
  SPEAKER_03: So um it's a really cool job, but I I also take it very seriously because it's also a big responsibility, in my opinion.
• 14:41
  SPEAKER_02: Absolutely.
• 14:43
  SPEAKER_02: So this topic here of New Mexico Spanish, I remember when, because I'm from Southern Colorado, um, my family's from New Mexico, moved up to Southern Colorado, but when we basically moved back to New Mexico, I remember one of the first things that was told to me was that you know, we're I was standing at the bus, and the kid next to me was like, Hey, where are you from?
• 15:07
  SPEAKER_02: And I told him my name.
• 15:09
  SPEAKER_02: He's like, Oh, are you Spanish?
• 15:10
  SPEAKER_02: And I was like, nah, bro, I'm a Chicano, because you know, that's that's what I grew up calling myself.
• 15:14
  SPEAKER_02: I'm a Chicano, I'm a child of the Chicano movement.
• 15:17
  SPEAKER_02: And he was like, Chicano?
• 15:19
  SPEAKER_02: What you mean like a Mexican?
• 15:21
  SPEAKER_02: And like the the words just dripped from his mouth, like, oh, I I I could just tell right there, like, oh man, here we go.
• 15:28
  SPEAKER_03: He said it with the Mexican accent.
• 15:31
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, right.
• 15:34
  SPEAKER_01: And uh more of a New Mexican accent.
• 15:37
  SPEAKER_01: Exactly.
• 15:38
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
• 15:38
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I mean, and yeah, and this kid was like the I mean, that was one of the first things he told me, was like, well, here we speak like an ancient Spanish.
• 15:48
  SPEAKER_02: And I was like, really?
• 15:50
  SPEAKER_02: I don't know.
• 15:50
  SPEAKER_02: It it all it piqued my interest.
• 15:52
  SPEAKER_02: This was like junior high when this happened, and then you know, living here from junior high forward, it was like that that idea was kept getting reinforced and reinforced and brought up.
• 16:05
  SPEAKER_02: And I'm like, where does this come from?
• 16:07
  SPEAKER_02: Because I don't know, my grandparents are from northern New Mexico, southern Colorado, and they've never claimed to speak like an ancient form of Spanish.
• 16:21
  SPEAKER_00: We'll be back after a quick break.
• 16:24
  SPEAKER_02: This episode of Tales from Ostlantis is brought to you by Ostlantis Premium.
• 16:29
  SPEAKER_02: Don't you just hate having your favorite podcast interrupted by ads like this?
• 16:34
  SPEAKER_02: Well, dear listener, you're in luck.
• 16:36
  SPEAKER_02: Because starting at just three bucks a month, you can support independent Chicano Media and receive ad-free episodes, premium episodes, bonus content, and access to our Discord server.
• 16:49
  SPEAKER_02: Just visit talesfromastlantis.com and click Go Premium, or follow the link in the show notes.
• 16:57
  SPEAKER_02: And now, on with the show.
• 17:03
  SPEAKER_03: Well, I think we have to look at uh our history.
• 17:06
  SPEAKER_03: That's a good place to start, right?
• 17:08
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, our Spanish language in New Mexico reflects our history, meaning it's vitally mixed and it's uh alive and it's vibrant, um, and it reflects all the different peoples that have been here and have come here over the past 500 years or so.
• 17:31
  SPEAKER_03: Um we have to remember uh uh the the Pueblo people are here first.
• 17:37
  SPEAKER_03: They're the first Nuevo Mexicanos, they're the first New Mexicans, and they're they're multilingual, they have their own languages, they don't speak Puebloan, they don't speak Indian, they speak uh different languages, Chihuahua, Quez, all kinds of different languages.
• 17:51
  SPEAKER_03: So they're diverse already.
• 17:52
  SPEAKER_03: And then you have to uh look at the different peoples coming in the Comanche, the Apache, the Navajo, they have their own languages.
• 18:00
  SPEAKER_03: The Spanish come.
• 18:01
  SPEAKER_03: And when we say the Spanish, that's always a difficult term to use because um it's kind of uh a catch-all term that assumes European and the Oñate colonization of 1598.
• 18:15
  SPEAKER_03: You know, I hear people say, oh, I descend from the Oñate colonists.
• 18:18
  SPEAKER_03: Well, that means you descend from Spanish people, mestizo people, mulato people, Mexican Indian people.
• 18:25
  SPEAKER_03: You you descend from a lot of different people because it was an international group that came up here.
• 18:32
  SPEAKER_03: And so all these people are speaking with each other and affecting the language.
• 18:38
  SPEAKER_03: Okay, so so you had you know, someone like Bartolome Romero's from Spain.
• 18:43
  SPEAKER_03: He's spending time in Mexico City, so is uh Bartolome Montoya.
• 18:47
  SPEAKER_03: They're hanging out and they come up with Oñate and people like Hernán Martín Serrano, who's Spanish but from Zacatecas and what's now Mexico.
• 18:55
  SPEAKER_03: He's speaking a certain way.
• 18:57
  SPEAKER_03: They're interacting with uh Mexican Indian warriors and servants and settlers and mestizos who speak a Spanish that is partly from their fathers who are Spanish and partly from their mothers who were native.
• 19:11
  SPEAKER_03: And out of the gate, you already have a Spanish that is likely not very much like what you would hear in Spain in 1598.
• 19:21
  SPEAKER_01: And it's all I think something something that that needs to be uh also addressed is that when people think of the Spaniards who are settling the Southwest, what we we now call the Southwest back then, it would have been the far northern frontier of New Spain and then later Mexico.
• 19:38
  SPEAKER_01: A lot of these people, when they call themselves Spanish, it it's not a reference to an ethnicity, it's a reference to a a class, a political class, an economic class in Mexico.
• 19:49
  SPEAKER_01: So to call yourself Spanish would be kind of the equivalent of people calling themselves Americans today that come from depending on the caste system.
• 19:57
  SPEAKER_03: This is the caste system.
• 20:00
  SPEAKER_01: But what I'm saying is that is that people people often confuse when they read it in a book that these people were Spanish back in the when they were colonizing and settling the southwest.
• 20:11
  SPEAKER_01: They they think of it in terms of ethnicity.
• 20:13
  SPEAKER_01: They don't think that the term Spanish itself is actually referring to a casta or a system of classification that has nothing to really.
• 20:22
  SPEAKER_01: It was.
• 20:22
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, look, we have to look at the people that came from Spain in the 1500s, they were not pure anything, they were mestizo people who were uh had European ancestry, they had Roman, Visigoth, Moorish, Muslim, North African, they had uh Sephardic, Jewish, they were there were Canary Islanders that were part Berber.
• 20:46
  SPEAKER_03: These people are coming over here to say they're European, even to say that is a bit of a stretch already.
• 20:54
  SPEAKER_03: So by the time they come here, they're used to mixing.
• 20:57
  SPEAKER_03: That's why they mixed so easily with the Aztec Nahuatl people that were in the Valley of Mexico, and then they come up here.
• 21:05
  SPEAKER_03: And the language they're speaking in the uh late 1500s and 1600s, it's about 30 percent Arabic.
• 21:13
  SPEAKER_03: It comes from vulgar Latin.
• 21:15
  SPEAKER_03: The Romans colonized Spain a couple of centuries before the time of Christ.
• 21:21
  SPEAKER_03: Um, and they bring vulgar vulgar Latin just meant the Latin of the people.
• 21:26
  SPEAKER_03: It was the language of the streets, okay?
• 21:29
  SPEAKER_03: Um, and that is where we get the roots of Spanish.
• 21:33
  SPEAKER_03: But you know, the Muslims are there 700 years, they're speaking Arabic, they're speaking uh dialects from North Africa.
• 21:40
  SPEAKER_03: It's mixing the Sephardic Jews, speak Ladino, which is a form of Spanish, but it's also the Jewish, uh Sephardic Jewish form of the language.
• 21:48
  SPEAKER_03: This is all mixing in the marketplace back home where families are uh integrating and coming together.
• 21:56
  SPEAKER_03: So they come up to uh uh Mexico and then.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_03: New Mexico and over the centuries it's it's mixing.
• 22:04
  SPEAKER_03: Just like uh you said in that uh introduction, um, we Oñate and and his colonists were already saying chocolate, tomate.
• 22:14
  SPEAKER_03: They were already saying these Nahuatl words.
• 22:16
  SPEAKER_03: It already wasn't just Spanish from Spain, you know, and this evolves uh over the centuries.
• 22:24
  SPEAKER_03: Uh we have to look at um, as uh Rubén said, look at the casta system.
• 22:30
  SPEAKER_03: Um, it was a system of trying to organize uh humanity uh in racial categories, a very racially uh uh charged society that wanted to maintain Spanish European dominance, not American Spanish, but European Spanish dominance at the top.
• 22:50
  SPEAKER_03: And then after that came, if you were born in the Americas as a but Spanish of real Spanish parents, then you were criollo.
• 22:59
  SPEAKER_03: And that's not what the New Mexicans were.
• 23:01
  SPEAKER_03: They were not criollos.
• 23:03
  SPEAKER_03: Then, as Rubén points out, you have the casta system.
• 23:06
  SPEAKER_03: So at the top is the term español.
• 23:08
  SPEAKER_03: This is where we get a lot of confusion.
• 23:10
  SPEAKER_03: Espanol typically meant you had some Indian blood, native blood, but you had uh married enough castizos and mestizos to where uh, for lack of a better term, it's whitewashed, okay?
• 23:24
  SPEAKER_03: But it's there, it's there, it's Mexican Indian because a lot of these colonists have grandmothers that were Mexican Indians or or moms.
• 23:32
  SPEAKER_03: Juan Griego's wife was a Mexican Indian.
• 23:35
  SPEAKER_03: Uh the uh Bartolomeo Montoya, his wife was a Mexican Indian.
• 23:39
  SPEAKER_03: We descend from not just those guys, we descend from uh the women, uh uh Pascual Bernal and Maria Zamora.
• 23:47
  SPEAKER_03: These are uh Mexican Indian women.
• 23:49
  SPEAKER_03: They're also part of our story, and they are teaching their kids how to speak Spanish too.
• 23:56
  SPEAKER_03: And there's and they're speaking about it.
• 23:57
  SPEAKER_01: But it's a little it's a little bit more nuanced.
• 23:59
  SPEAKER_03: They're not speaking it like people.
• 24:00
  SPEAKER_01: It's a little bit more nuanced in in that you also had people who were um phenotypically and and in terms of like their genetic makeup were predominantly indigenous, but if they married into uh a Spanish family, they would be classed as Spanish by default just because they got married to the city.
• 24:20
  SPEAKER_01: Well, exactly.
• 24:21
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, this this casta system was heavily enforced in Mexico City and Puebla.
• 24:26
  SPEAKER_03: There is a term called passing for Spaniard, and you could get into trouble if you were a mestizo or an indio or a castizo trying to pass for an español.
• 24:36
  SPEAKER_03: But in New Mexico, we're on the edge of empire.
• 24:39
  SPEAKER_03: We're in in New Mexico, the mestizo becomes the español class because there are no españolas here, there aren't any from Spain except your priests coming here and your governors.
• 24:51
  SPEAKER_03: And we have reports from them.
• 24:53
  SPEAKER_03: We have reports from uh 1631 uh Fray Esteban de Perea.
• 24:57
  SPEAKER_03: He says that the Pueblo Indians are a bad influence on the the uh uh Espanoles, but he says the Espanol class are superstitious, they're gossipy, they're mixed blood.
• 25:10
  SPEAKER_03: We we see this throughout the centuries and we hear what they say because they write it down and what they think about our Spanish.
• 25:19
  SPEAKER_03: Um, Dominguez in Missions of New Mexico, he said that um in uh places like Santa Fe or Albuquerque, that uh they speak the Castilian tongue simply and naturally among themselves, with the exception of the Europeans and other people from lands educated in speaking with courtly polish.
• 25:40
  SPEAKER_03: In other words, we spoke peasant rural Spanish.
• 25:44
  SPEAKER_03: But what's more telling to me is what he says here.
• 25:48
  SPEAKER_03: He says, um, my remark that speaking Spanish in a simple manner applies to the Spaniards was made with due reflection, for there are a number of genizaro Indians in this villa who, after being ransomed from the pagans by our people, are then emancipated to work out their account under them.
• 26:06
  SPEAKER_03: Although they are servants among our people, they are not very fluent in speaking and understanding Castilian perfectly.
• 26:15
  SPEAKER_03: For however much they may talk or learn the language, they do not wholly understand it or speak it without twisting it somewhat.
• 26:24
  SPEAKER_03: Um, in 1801, a priest in Albuquerque, a Spanish priest, said, The people here are genizaros, they're mulatos and mestizos.
• 26:34
  SPEAKER_03: Some have Spanish blood, but it's not a lot.
• 26:37
  SPEAKER_03: They think they're Spaniards, they say they're Spanish, but they're not.
• 26:41
  SPEAKER_03: And he said that.
• 26:42
  SPEAKER_02: And that continues to this very day.
• 26:44
  SPEAKER_03: And he said they speak, they speak Castilian poorly.
• 26:48
  SPEAKER_03: I'm not saying this to knock our ancestors or to knock us, it's just the going back to this idea that um people, you know, I read Fray Heliko Chavez.
• 27:01
  SPEAKER_03: I his his translation here is where he uses the term Spaniards, you know, that's not what he was referring to the local people as.
• 27:10
  SPEAKER_03: Um there's this idea of of the language uh being um archaic, so so the idea that, well, Dominguez in 1776 or that priest and Albuquerque in 1801, they would not have recognized the pure Castilian Spanish of the 1500s they were hearing.
• 27:32
  SPEAKER_03: That's hard to believe.
• 27:34
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, that would have only been a hundred years earlier, 150 years earlier.
• 27:38
  SPEAKER_03: For them to not recognize old Spanish would have been uh almost impossible.
• 27:43
  SPEAKER_03: How come they couldn't recognize it?
• 27:45
  SPEAKER_03: But we can.
• 27:46
  SPEAKER_03: I find that really hard to believe.
• 27:49
  SPEAKER_03: Um, what they were hearing, in my opinion, was a Spanish that was an amalgam of Spanish from Spain.
• 27:57
  SPEAKER_03: It's there.
• 27:57
  SPEAKER_03: We, you know, estás hablamos español.
• 28:01
  SPEAKER_03: We we all speak Spanish, but you're remember the the genizaros were the servant class for this in the 1700s for about four or five generations.
• 28:10
  SPEAKER_03: They were helping raise the kids of even the elite in New Mexico, and the elite would have been barely middle class in Mexico City, but their pronunciation would definitely have entered into our Spanish.
• 28:26
  SPEAKER_03: How can it not have just like those uh Mexican Indians that came with Oñata and came up uh over the centuries, they're speaking Spanish, but they speak it with an accent.
• 28:38
  SPEAKER_03: Why wouldn't they?
• 28:38
  SPEAKER_03: It's not their mother tongue, and they're they're interacting with people from Spain, people from Mexico who are Spanish but speaking Spanish.
• 28:48
  SPEAKER_03: It can't possibly be archaic, pure Spanish from Castile.
• 28:55
  SPEAKER_03: It's it's impossible.
• 28:57
  SPEAKER_02: It doesn't make any sense, and that's what cracks me up about that um the quote from the Milagro Beanfield War when he's like they pronounce their C's and Z with the Castilian T H sound.
• 29:08
  SPEAKER_02: And I'm like, bro, I've never heard my grandparents or my great-grandents.
• 29:13
  SPEAKER_03: Well, not only that, ever the historical chronology is completely wrong in that quote.
• 29:19
  SPEAKER_03: The the list, the the the soft seasoned disease, that comes much later.
• 29:25
  SPEAKER_03: Um, no one was saying, speaking like that uh in the 1500s.
• 29:30
  SPEAKER_03: That's a later development in Spain.
• 29:32
  SPEAKER_03: And we have to remember Castilian dialect like the you know, that Spanish from Spain that we hear in modern times.
• 29:43
  SPEAKER_03: Um uh that was not being uh spoken here.
• 29:46
  SPEAKER_03: That's later.
• 29:48
  SPEAKER_03: That the idea that New Mexicans speak like that is not true at all.
• 29:53
  SPEAKER_03: In fact, um, if you really listen to how we speak in northern New Mexico, it to me it sounds probably more like how Genizaro Indians spoke Spanish than any colonist from 1598.
• 30:08
  SPEAKER_03: That's impossible.
• 30:09
  SPEAKER_03: If our language was frozen in time, we would have a dead language.
• 30:14
  SPEAKER_03: It would be it would be dead.
• 30:16
  SPEAKER_03: It's not a dead language, just like to say, well, I'm I'm just there's there's the Oñate colonist, and then there's me.
• 30:22
  SPEAKER_00: That that's that's we'll be back after a quick break.
• 30:29
  SPEAKER_02: Have you picked up your Mexica calendar for the year twelve, Flint?
• 30:33
  SPEAKER_02: Or how about a paperback copy of the four disagreements?
• 30:37
  SPEAKER_02: Just visit tales from Ostlanthus.com for all the latest merchandise and show some love for your favorite podcast.
• 30:45
  SPEAKER_02: That's TalesFromostlantis.com for all the latest merchandise.
• 30:51
  SPEAKER_02: Now, back to the show.
• 30:58
  SPEAKER_03: Impossible.
• 30:58
  SPEAKER_03: We're we're we're uh twelve generations have passed of blending and combining, and you know, people get upset with me, they say I'm trying to reject our Spanish past.
• 31:09
  SPEAKER_03: It's like that's not what I'm doing.
• 31:10
  SPEAKER_03: I'm I'm adding to what we know.
• 31:13
  SPEAKER_03: Uh I'm just adding that it's not just Spanish, it's uh it's Mexican Indian, it's genizaro Indian, it's Puebloan, and then American.
• 31:22
  SPEAKER_03: Look, in span in New Mexico Spanish, um uh you you might say, uh, my my grandparents from Mora used to speak, actually, they spoke very clearly.
• 31:32
  SPEAKER_03: It's a simijo, fuimos a la sierra, montaos a caballo, but the cousins up in the mountains would say, Hey, fimos caballo, hey, jug like the the the the language uh we weren't close to universities like Salamanca or uh Mexico City, so the language almost unravels over the centuries, right?
• 31:58
  SPEAKER_02: And it's it's like when my dad calls me up on the phone and he's like, hey, que está indo.
• 32:01
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I mean, yeah, that's just how we speak, and I'm proud of it.
• 32:05
  SPEAKER_03: But it we don't have to turn it into 16th century Castilian to be proud of it, right?
• 32:10
  SPEAKER_03: You know, we also see say, Pues mira, vamos al show.
• 32:16
  SPEAKER_03: Yep.
• 32:16
  SPEAKER_03: The moon beer, the moon beer.
• 32:18
  SPEAKER_03: That that's American, that's English, that reflects our history.
• 32:23
  SPEAKER_03: We're not part of Spain or Mexico anymore.
• 32:26
  SPEAKER_03: We became part of the American system starting in 1850, and that changed how we speak too.
• 32:32
  SPEAKER_03: So it's kind of like our bloodlines.
• 32:34
  SPEAKER_03: It's difficult to peel back and try to say, well, I'm only Spanish or anything.
• 32:40
  SPEAKER_03: It's like trying to take the eggs out of a pancake batter.
• 32:44
  SPEAKER_03: It's impossible.
• 32:46
  SPEAKER_01: So I I uh when I was in graduate school, um uh our university has uh um um a campus out uh near Taos, near Rancho de la Taos called Fort Bergwin.
• 32:58
  SPEAKER_01: And it's just down the road from Rancho de la Taos and Taos uh Pueblo and the Taos uh town, I guess you would call it.
• 33:06
  SPEAKER_01: Um and I remember uh the local people that that you know worked at Fort Bergwin to, you know, at in the kitchen and servicing the the different facilities there, all of them were basically Novo Mexicanos from the north.
• 33:21
  SPEAKER_01: And I got to talking to them once because you know, as as we were talking uh before we started recording about how I collect uh Chicano music and Mexican music here from the southwest, and I try to dig like for the old vinyl.
• 33:33
  SPEAKER_01: And uh I was asking them if they knew of any places around Taos where I could find like authentic Novo Mexicano music on vinyl because I wanted to get some.
• 33:42
  SPEAKER_01: I didn't have any in my collection.
• 33:44
  SPEAKER_01: And then they're like, Well, what kind of music are you looking for?
• 33:46
  SPEAKER_01: And I say, Well, you know, I'm from Texas, and we call ourselves Tejanos in Texas, and we have Tejano music, and we have people like Little Joe and uh Remerera, and they're like, Oh, we know those guys, yeah, and that's Chicano music.
• 33:59
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm and it kind of startled me because I didn't expect to hear this lady that worked in the kitchen at Fort Burg when as we're interacting about music tell me, Yeah, we're Chicanos, you're a Chicano just like us.
• 34:10
  SPEAKER_01: You know, she's that those are the words that came out of her mouth.
• 34:13
  SPEAKER_01: And and that kind of circumvented uh and subverted my entire idea that I had about people from northern New Mexico in terms of you know what I had listened, had heard and read in in some books uh about Novo Mexicano history had always led me to believe that most people, if not all, just considered themselves to be uh pure Spanish.
• 34:34
  SPEAKER_01: And then this lady's telling me, yeah, we're Chicanos here too.
• 34:37
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm like, whoa, that's crazy.
• 34:38
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I didn't stop to hear that.
• 34:40
  SPEAKER_01: So it goes back to what you're saying.
• 34:42
  SPEAKER_01: It's it's it's a lot more nuanced and a lot more conspiracy.
• 34:45
  SPEAKER_01: And it's a lot more interesting.
• 34:46
  SPEAKER_01: But it is more interesting.
• 34:47
  SPEAKER_01: The truth is always more interesting.
• 34:48
  SPEAKER_03: It is, you don't have to invent anything that uh it's with our language, it's with our food.
• 34:52
  SPEAKER_03: Our food is uh we have chile from Mexico, we have corn and frijoles and uh calabazas from the Pueblo people, you throw in some people, you throw in some uh uh pork from Spain and some garlic and onions, and that's what makes it interesting, right?
• 35:10
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, and that's the same thing with our language and even our music, you know.
• 35:15
  SPEAKER_03: Um uh we have and believe me, we have unique cultural attributions here, but so does Chihuahua, so does Oaxaca, so does Yucatán.
• 35:27
  SPEAKER_03: I I've had people tell me, well, you know, we're we're we're not Mexican because we're just so unique from them.
• 35:32
  SPEAKER_03: I'm like, well, we're unique in the same way that all these other regions of Mexico are unique.
• 35:37
  SPEAKER_03: Um, but we also fit in with Mexico to a point.
• 35:42
  SPEAKER_03: Now we're American, but but I think it's it's something that we really we really need to think about what we mean when we say things.
• 35:51
  SPEAKER_03: For example, on Facebook, I love going to the fans of uh New Mexico Spanish music.
• 35:58
  SPEAKER_03: They have a there's a Facebook page and it says fans, something like that.
• 36:02
  SPEAKER_03: I don't know if I have it right, fans of New Mexico Spanish music.
• 36:04
  SPEAKER_03: And I go and I'm like, these are all Mexican songs.
• 36:07
  SPEAKER_03: There's nothing Spanish or from Spain.
• 36:10
  SPEAKER_03: They do volver, volver, you know, uh, you know, um I'm like, where's the actual New Mexican music?
• 36:18
  SPEAKER_01: I'm gonna hear something.
• 36:19
  SPEAKER_03: Your actual New Mexican music is gonna be your things like alabados from the penitentes or your alabanzas, the the rural songs that are religious about saints, or your inditas, your indita de Manuel Maez, or Placida Romero, or you know, um these are your New Mexico songs, but that canon of music is kind of limited, you know.
• 36:43
  SPEAKER_03: So so we have a lot of Mexican music as part of our and a lot of Tejano music too.
• 36:50
  SPEAKER_01: I was listening to the station uh that plays at, I forget what it's called, but but I was listening to and they played a lot of Tejano standards played by New Mexican bands.
• 36:59
  SPEAKER_03: Well, yeah I mean to me, Al Hurricane music sounds a lot like Tejano music, and to me, Tejano music sounds a lot like Mexican music.
• 37:06
  SPEAKER_03: So I mean, you know, yeah.
• 37:08
  SPEAKER_03: Well, there's yeah, well, yeah.
• 37:10
  SPEAKER_03: Well, maybe that's another episode, okay?
• 37:12
  SPEAKER_03: But but that's different, but um that's a different episode.
• 37:17
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, you know, Texas was part of Mexico.
• 37:21
  SPEAKER_03: Um, and and so you have those cultural roots there.
• 37:24
  SPEAKER_03: If from Texas, going into Nuevo Leon and Monterrey, they're they're there, they're connected, you know, and we're connected to Chihuahua.
• 37:31
  SPEAKER_03: You know, that's that's what we're what this is about.
• 37:34
  SPEAKER_03: Our uh going back to this mythology that we have, that our Spanish is different, it is different, but it's not from Spain necessarily, just like Tejano Spanish is different, you know, it's it has its own lilt, its own cadence.
• 37:51
  SPEAKER_03: Uh, but we have uh a uniqueness here.
• 37:55
  SPEAKER_03: But I do think, like um Curly, like you were saying in in the introduction, you know, we have places like Atrisco and Analco, these are places that have Mesoamerican roots, uh not just linguistically, but genetically and historically.
• 38:12
  SPEAKER_03: And that's part of our story.
• 38:14
  SPEAKER_03: I think what we have to uh try to get beyond is this trying to separate ourselves.
• 38:21
  SPEAKER_03: I see it all the time with the subgroups here in New Mexico, and sometimes I like it, and sometimes it gets me a little nervous.
• 38:31
  SPEAKER_02: Well, you had mentioned um Pascuala Bernal earlier, and you know, Bernalillo is named after her.
• 38:37
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, and I'm like Bernalillo County is like named after this Nahua woman who was the wife of uh Griego.
• 38:46
  SPEAKER_02: Uh was it Juan Griego?
• 38:48
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 38:49
  SPEAKER_02: Um but what if you meet a Griego today, they only talk about Juan Griego, right?
• 38:55
  SPEAKER_02: Like they're like, yeah, our ancestry comes from Greece.
• 38:58
  SPEAKER_02: And I'm like, yeah, but what about this woman?
• 39:00
  SPEAKER_02: Like, that's and then her kids, if you read the documents, I think her oldest son, they call him in the documents a Nahuatlato, like a speaker of Nahuatl, and that he served as an interpreter for uh Nahuat speakers, the Spanish crown, and two Pueblo people.
• 39:19
  SPEAKER_02: So there's like this really cool intermixing right off the bat of all these linguistic traditions.
• 39:26
  SPEAKER_02: Well, that's the yeah, and this purity myth just wipes all of that away, it ignores all of it.
• 39:34
  SPEAKER_03: Well, that's what I'm saying.
• 39:36
  SPEAKER_03: I see it all the time.
• 39:36
  SPEAKER_03: People say I descend from Hernan Martín Serrano, the Spaniard that came with Oñate from Zacatecas.
• 39:44
  SPEAKER_03: I do too.
• 39:45
  SPEAKER_03: We all do.
• 39:46
  SPEAKER_03: That's another thing.
• 39:47
  SPEAKER_03: We all descend from these people.
• 39:49
  SPEAKER_03: It's not like uh, you know, uh a thing that only you can claim or one person can claim.
• 39:54
  SPEAKER_03: We all there, that's like the genetic foundation of Hispanic New Mexico, but but you're right.
• 40:01
  SPEAKER_03: It kind of frustrates me because I get it, you know, we descend from Hernán Martín Serrano, but we descend from his two sons, Hernan and Luis, who are both mestizos.
• 40:12
  SPEAKER_03: They were both mestizos, so we descend from their moms too, who were Native American.
• 40:18
  SPEAKER_03: And and I mean, I don't know what else to say.
• 40:21
  SPEAKER_03: Um, I don't know what you guys think.
• 40:23
  SPEAKER_03: To me, it's just uh it's selective memory, it's selective history, it's even uh racism, you know.
• 40:30
  SPEAKER_03: To to absolutely identify with the the Spanish side, you know, with uh, you know, put up statues of uh Europeans and say that's my culture, the European guy on a statue, and if you take it down, you're attacking my culture, which is completely false.
• 40:49
  SPEAKER_02: Well, it's interesting that you bring that up because that's one of the things that I saw happen over the whole um the you know, the the fight that happened over these statues of of Juan de Oñate was people who would normally be hardcore, like, no, I'm Spanish.
• 41:10
  SPEAKER_02: This is my ancestry.
• 41:12
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, they kind of brought out that indigenous ancestry when it was convenient.
• 41:16
  SPEAKER_02: They would be like, Well, how can I be racist if my great-great-grandmother was Navajo?
• 41:23
  SPEAKER_02: And I'm like, bro, that's the first time you've probably ever claimed your great-great-grandmother, and you're claiming it to be a jerk.
• 41:30
  SPEAKER_02: Like, that's the the they they I mean, you saw it all play out with the statues coming down and people that should normally be united.
• 41:42
  SPEAKER_02: Uh this like all these divisions came up over identity, and an identity based purely on, well, I grew up speaking this language.
• 41:53
  SPEAKER_02: Like, I speak Spanish, therefore I'm Spanish.
• 41:56
  SPEAKER_02: And it's like, yeah, but I mean I speak English, bro.
• 41:59
  SPEAKER_02: I'm not British.
• 42:00
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 42:00
  SPEAKER_03: Well, that's the thing.
• 42:02
  SPEAKER_03: Part of it is we we have quite an inheritance here.
• 42:05
  SPEAKER_03: Uh, Rubén, you pointed it out earlier.
• 42:07
  SPEAKER_03: We were talking about the term español and and the the loaded term that it is, and so we we have that double whammy that was passed down to us.
• 42:17
  SPEAKER_03: That it's and you know, in a way you can't blame people in a in a stratified society like that.
• 42:22
  SPEAKER_03: It's always better to be the espanol than the mestizo or the indio or the you know the africano.
• 42:31
  SPEAKER_03: But you know, you you get that, and then all of a sudden we become part of the United States, and they don't want us to be a state because we're Mexicans and uh mixed blood people and uh according to them, savage Indians.
• 42:43
  SPEAKER_03: So it takes us 60 years.
• 42:45
  SPEAKER_03: We had enough people in 1850, but it took us 60 years because of that uh racism.
• 42:52
  SPEAKER_03: You know, um, one politician or a general, I think, uh in New Mexico in the 1880s, 1870s or 1880s said we should declare war on Mexico again and make them take back New Mexico because they did not like us.
• 43:07
  SPEAKER_03: So the only way it could happen for them to like us was for us to all of a sudden become Spanish.
• 43:14
  SPEAKER_03: And it goes back to uh there was a very insulting piece in the newspaper, I think in Las Vegas, New Mexico, that was it uh very derogatory about us New Mexicans.
• 43:25
  SPEAKER_03: So Eusebio Chacón, a writer, a poet, uh uh very well-versed man, said something like, uh, I am a descendant of Oñate or his colonists, and the blood that runs in my veins are those of conquistadores.
• 43:40
  SPEAKER_03: I think he meant well.
• 43:41
  SPEAKER_03: He was trying to stand up for his people, but I think his tactic was wrong.
• 43:46
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, he should have Yeah, we cover that exact quote in um episode three of this podcast.
• 43:52
  SPEAKER_02: So he um, yeah, and he goes off like there's no uh, you know, no blood flows through my veins other than that of the Spanish noble, and if I have any Indian blood, it's it's so little as to be practically nothing.
• 44:07
  SPEAKER_02: Now I'm gonna go eat some frijoles with uh corn and chile tortillas and tortillas.
• 44:15
  SPEAKER_03: That's what we all do, man.
• 44:16
  SPEAKER_03: I love that food, man.
• 44:18
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 44:19
  SPEAKER_01: There's different strands here that you can pull to try to get at the source of where this stems from because obviously Jacon is one thread you can pull on.
• 44:30
  SPEAKER_01: You can also, you know, uh tug on on those novels that were being written at the turn of the of the you know the late 1900s and and the early 20th century, where you have these white women that are talking about the Spanish uh noble Southwest and the Caballetas.
• 44:47
  SPEAKER_03: The Dons and the Donas.
• 44:49
  SPEAKER_01: The Dons and the Donas.
• 44:51
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, exactly.
• 44:51
  SPEAKER_01: So so this mythology doesn't have one single source.
• 44:55
  SPEAKER_01: This this is the Spanish Southwestern mythology has different threads that you can see.
• 45:00
  SPEAKER_01: Absolutely right.
• 45:01
  SPEAKER_01: And and and and they kind of coalesce and come together sometime in the middle of the 20th century to produce this idea that especially when you begin to get a lot of Mexican immigrants into the U.S.
• 45:15
  SPEAKER_01: that are coming in and especially through Texas, and then a lot of them come up through El Paso and end up making their way all the way to California, Los Angeles.
• 45:24
  SPEAKER_01: And so people that are passing through New Mexico, I mean you do have some Mexican immigration in New Mexico, but it's not as as uh as big as it's been in Texas and California.
• 45:33
  SPEAKER_01: And and so people to distinguish themselves from those immigrant Mexicans, a lot of them who tend to be people who come from rural communities, who come from poor communities because they're seeking a better life or what have you, people here in the in in in in the Southwest, you know, people who have been here for generations begin to try to make a distinction between themselves and those lowly, you know, Mexicans that are recent immigrants.
• 45:58
  SPEAKER_01: And so this this idea to adopt a superior sort of culture, a Spanish culture, and attach your identity to that begins to sort of take hold uh sometime during the 1940s and 1950s.
• 46:10
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that's when when the movie of the Milagro Beanfield Ward uh sort of takes place, like roughly around the generation of those people that begin to sort of assume the Spanish identity of sorts.
• 46:22
  SPEAKER_03: You're touching on some good points, Rubén.
• 46:25
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, um also it's that period in the like 1910, 1920 when you have these pioneer days being established throughout small towns throughout the United States to celebrate pioneers.
• 46:37
  SPEAKER_03: Well, in Santa Fe, it becomes the entrada.
• 46:40
  SPEAKER_03: That's where that comes from, this idea of celebrating, you know, um conquistadores and and uh you know the coming together, you know, uh, of the Spanish and the Pueblo people in a very um kind of um uh mythological way.
• 46:59
  SPEAKER_03: And and you're right, that feeds all that, you know.
• 47:02
  SPEAKER_03: Uh, but you know, I've also wondered why someone like my dad from Mora, he I wonder if that was more of a city thing, you know, in the in Mora, my dad used to go see movies with Pedro Infante uh when he was a kid in the late 1930s, early 1940s, and he wanted to be a Mexican mariachi, and there was no pushback.
• 47:22
  SPEAKER_03: There were, you know, the I I think it was also something about the the more you in the people had to interact more where the where the uh white American major was the majority that that tended to be like you just said, Ruben, this idea of uh of being uh Spanish, Spanish and not Mexican.
• 47:44
  SPEAKER_03: And you know, it it's it's uh it ties into our language, but you know, I keep trying, as state historian, I'm you know, I I have taken some heat, just so you know, from uh some quarters, even friends, and they're still my friends, but they disagree with me and uh we we joke about it, but you know, um I I think uh it's important that we be honest about our history, because as you said earlier, Curly, the truth is much more interesting.
• 48:13
  SPEAKER_03: There's nothing to be afraid of.
• 48:15
  SPEAKER_03: There's a saying that the truth will set you free, man.
• 48:18
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, you know, why not be honest?
• 48:21
  SPEAKER_03: You can still study Hernan Martín Serrano, but study who his uh wife or the woman who was the mother of his sons here in New Mexico, because those were the first real New Mexicans, the sons who were part Spanish and part uh Tehua Indian, Tano Indian, whatever, you know, I don't we don't know for sure what one of them was, but but they're there and they're they're in the records as mestizos, and their mom was a New Mexican native, and those children of uh of uh Juan Griego and uh Bartolome Montoya who who are part Mexican-Indian, we need to learn about all sides, the the whole story.
• 48:59
  SPEAKER_03: It's it's it's much more interesting, and it does connect us to Mexico because New Mexico does not even have a Spanish past without Mexico.
• 49:09
  SPEAKER_03: You know, one of the most frustrating things I've heard, and I'm sure you guys have, is that, well, you know, there was no such thing as Mexico before 1821, so we couldn't possibly be connected before then.
• 49:19
  SPEAKER_03: It's like, yeah what are you talking about?
• 49:21
  SPEAKER_03: We're completely connected.
• 49:22
  SPEAKER_03: We were governed from Mexico City.
• 49:24
  SPEAKER_03: Uh the Catholic Church in Durango, Mexico governed us.
• 49:28
  SPEAKER_03: Uh uh, we were constantly moving back and forth along the Camino Real, uh, people of mixed blood and bringing foods and language, changed language uh back and forth.
• 49:41
  SPEAKER_03: This idea that we were uh completely isolated, uh, had nothing to do with Mexico, is just the doc the documents show that was not true at all.
• 49:50
  SPEAKER_02: Well, not only that, but when they say that, they're like they're conflating the Mexican nation, right, that existed in 1821 with the city state of Mexico, which then Ochtitlan became Mexico City.
• 50:08
  SPEAKER_02: And when the Spaniards came, you know, uh started warring with the Mexican people, they called them Mexicanos.
• 50:16
  SPEAKER_02: And and so you know, they called the language Mexicano, they you know, they they speak Mexicano, these are Mexicano people, these are Indios Mexicanos, and I always bring that up like, well, wait a minute, if um if we can't be Mexicans because there was no such thing as Mexico, how could our state be called New Mexico if if Mexico didn't exist?
• 50:39
  SPEAKER_02: Well we're called like they they get it all confused.
• 50:42
  SPEAKER_03: They don't know New Mexico, Nuevo Mexico, La Nueva Mexico goes back to the 1580s, and that's because they thought they were gonna find a new city of Mexico up here with with uh native peoples and the same amount of wealth.
• 50:57
  SPEAKER_03: Obviously, they didn't, but that's why Viagra, uh his uh epic poem is called La Historia de la Nueva Mexico, it's named after the city of Mexico.
• 51:09
  SPEAKER_03: But even his epic poem, which is propaganda, propaganda, for sure, but he even opens it mentioning the Mexicans, the Mexicans coming to the land where the Mexicans came from.
• 51:24
  SPEAKER_03: So it's quite interesting that even that, even in that, the the Mechica, the Nahuatl people are in that book, you know that, yeah.
• 51:36
  SPEAKER_03: So it it it it you can't, we can't we can't get away from that.
• 51:41
  SPEAKER_03: And I don't know why we would want to, uh, except for just prejudice and racism.
• 51:46
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, um, my mom growing up, my mom used to say, why is there so much uh bad feelings against Mexicans in Mexico in this country?
• 51:54
  SPEAKER_03: They've never done anything to this country.
• 51:56
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, we've gone to war with Germany and twice, and now we just go, oh, here's Germans, welcome, come on in.
• 52:03
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, we love German people, you know.
• 52:05
  SPEAKER_03: Um there just seems to be this animosity, and I don't know if it goes back to Leenda Negra Europe, where uh Protestant England and Catholic Spain used to get into it, you know.
• 52:17
  SPEAKER_03: But um, so you have it playing out maybe again here over the last 200 years with Protestant United States coming into conflict with Catholic Mexico.
• 52:27
  SPEAKER_03: Um that might be part of it.
• 52:30
  SPEAKER_03: Uh also the first two international wars the United States got into, with the exception of fighting England, were against Hispanic countries, uh Mexico and then Spain.
• 52:43
  SPEAKER_03: So I don't know if that's part of it, but um I I think it's something I think uh New Mexicans should embrace.
• 52:51
  SPEAKER_03: It doesn't mean they have to hate Spain or reject Spain, it just means uh being honest and open about our real history, our language, and our culture.
• 53:04
  SPEAKER_02: Absolutely.
• 53:05
  SPEAKER_02: Well, you know what I like to say?
• 53:08
  SPEAKER_02: I say the truth is like medicine, sir.
• 53:13
  SPEAKER_02: It doesn't always taste good, but it's always good for you.
• 53:17
  SPEAKER_03: Amen.
• 53:19
  SPEAKER_02: I want to thank Rob Martinez for joining us on this very special episode of Tales from Aslantes, and uh, we will see you next time.
• 53:43
  SPEAKER_01: That was good.
• 54:21
  SPEAKER_02: If you enjoy the show, please consider becoming a Patreon supporter.
• 54:26
  SPEAKER_02: You can do this by visiting TalesFromoclantis.com and clicking support the podcast.
• 54:33
  SPEAKER_02: Your continued support will help keep the podcast ad free and independent.
• 54:38
  SPEAKER_02: Until next time, Timo Itase.