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Criando
Historia: Moving from Representation to Reclamation
New Mexico’s history has long since been an object of fascination,
indeed enchantment, where the image of Hispanic New Mexicans
has been subject to very particular constructions and imaginations.
Nuevomexicano culture, community and consciousness
has thus been significantly overdetermined by the issue of
representation. While these historical representations have
involved a number of entities, including individual writers
and photographers, state and federal-based agencies, such
as the Department of Tourism and the Museum of New
Mexico and the Library of Congress, have also participated
in these manifest imaginings. Even archival repositories,
often premised on singular narrative perspectives have been
equally complicit. As a counterpoint to these past and ongoing
representations, this paper proposes to forefront the ideology
of reclamation. Reclamation necessitates, however
an understanding of what is underlying. In this, it is critical
to understand that the archives, museums and monuments upon
which we are so dependent for interpretation are themselves
cultural artifacts, built on and from institutional structures
that have obscured, if not erased certain kinds of knowledge,
secreted some and valorized others. The colonizing pen and
the objective gaze have been predominantly about singular
perspectives, as have often been the interpretations that
have followed. In this way, both have imagined a past, literally
constructed an image of what can be known, thought and identified.
Yet the erasure of dissonant voices has fostered an image
that has marginalized the full complexity of this community,
in race, caste, class and gender alike. Toward a new interpretation,
recovery will mean revisiting site by site, whereby more pressing
questions should be asked about how official accounts were
produced, transmitted and classified. Beyond the juxtaposition of the
surface with what is underlying, reclamation will also posit,
I believe, reflections of this community that are not fixed
or static, but instead alive with change, accommodation and
imbued even with contradiction. After all, identity, including
that of New Mexico itself, is no museum piece sitting stock
still in glass cases, no singular archival document, no manifest
monument, but instead is, as Eduardo Galeano writes, the astonishing
synthesis of the contradictions of everyday life. In this
movement toward reclamation, the contradictions—a word from
the Latin, contra dicer, to present an alternative
story—will draw from moments throughout the histories of New
Mexico where such counterpoints have been evident. This is
especially true, even as the official stories, the representations
of New Mexico’s people, have been dominant.
Copyright © 2003
Smithsonian Institution |
