Los Alamos, New Mexico’s tourism website quickly clues visitors into what the city considers its two principal assets. There’s the national laboratory, represented by an illustrated atom, and there are three national parks, represented in an illustrated leaf. Underneath these symbols is the slogan “where discoveries are made.”

In 2021, New Mexico attracted 7.2 billion in tourist dollars. Many visitors come for the leaf: Outdoor recreation added $2.3 billion to the state’s economy that year. Meanwhile, the atom—the state’s nuclear past and present—attracts a subset of tourists who come to visit Los Alamos National Laboratory, the Trinity test site, and the National Museum of Nuclear Science and History in Albuquerque. The most hardcore might also check out the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in Carlsbad.

New Mexico is famously the “Land of Enchantment.” “Enchantment” is an abstract noun that evokes remoteness, isolation, and emptiness. It’s easy to see how environmental tourism seeks this out: It’s about sunset-chasing and finding peace in vast expanses of open desert. Nuclear tourism, meanwhile, is an extension of the military’s expansion into civilian life—the cultural arm of a national mission to continue making bombs. It consists of attractions that erase the deathly realities of nuclear events in favor of mythologies of noble actors doing difficult things for the sake of the U.S.’s democracy. But while these two types of tourism might seem opposed, in seeking enchantment, New Mexico’s visitors are oddly alike. In New Mexico, ogling nuclear weapons and enjoying nature are two sides of the same coin: Both activities conjure the state as a blank slate.

New Mexico began calling itself the “Land of Enchantment” in 1999, lifting its moniker from a 1906 travelogue about the Southwest. Author Lilian Whiting wrote that New Mexico was “a territory…whose ethnological interest” in the “remains of Cliff dwellers and of a people far antedating any authentic records, enchains the scientist,” and that its future “promises almost infinitely varied riches.”

Whiting saw New Mexico as the one of most “uncivilized localities” of the Southwest, replicating 20th-century attitudes that assumed Indigenous people were on the brink of vanishing. She described the region as unpopulated, but what she meant was that it hadn’t been settled by Anglo-Americans.

The contemporary earthy tourists that come to see White Sands, the Gila National Forest, or Shiprock caption their Instagram posts with similar language to Whiting’s. They’re exposed to the language and imagery of enchantment and emptiness by the state’s tourism campaign. Today, the slogan is “NM True,” but the vision it’s peddling is the same: star-studded vistas, mountains, forest, and sand dunes all empty and isolated. Vacancy—as an assumption that erases racialized communities—is central to enchantment.

The more complicated reality is that these seemingly empty destinations are products of multiple, contradictory layers of history: resource extraction, the seizure of land for national parks, and military land uses. Nowhere is this most apparent than at the seemingly empty sites visited by nuclear tourists.

In the 70 years since the Trinity site—where the Atomic Age’s first blast melted the sand in an explosion 1.5 times hotter than the surface of the sun on July 16, 1945—first held an open house, New Mexico has become ground zero for nuclear tourism. Army officials installed the obelisk of igneous rock marking Ground Zero in 1965. Today, it is a favorite spot for tourists to snap pictures. Officials designated the site and its grounds a National Historic Landmark in 1975.

In 1969, Congress established Albuquerque’s National Museum of Nuclear Science and History “as an intriguing place to learn the story of the Atomic Age, from early research of nuclear development through today’s peaceful uses of nuclear technology.” Initially staffed by Air Force personnel, the institution is a testament to Cold War efforts to sustain curiosity and enthusiasm around nuclear science.

In Los Alamos, the operational laboratories are closed to the public, there are lots of visitor opportunities—including, since Christopher Nolan’s film, downloadable maps of filming locations and local “Project Oppenheimer” themed experiences that involve drinks, shopping, and sightseeing. Soon, the Los Alamos location of the new Manhattan Project National Historical Park—comprised of three sites across the U.S. that played a significant part in developing the bomb—will open to the public. The weekend of Oppenheimer’s premiere, local news reported a “swell” of calls to the Museum of Nuclear History in Albuquerque and tourists “flocking” to Los Alamos.

Seeing the state as a giant playground for recreation and experimentation is not so different from conceiving of it as an amenity for private enjoyment. In both the nuclear and outdoors tourist economies, it pays to be empty. You can see this in Oppenheimer, much of whose plot turns on the title character’s lifelong yearning: “If only I could combine physics and New Mexico, then I’d truly be happy.”

What is he yearning for? Emptiness, it seems. Emptiness offers Oppenheimer freedom from harm, guilt, and accountability. At times, the film feels like an ad campaign for New Mexico’s nuclear tourism: the empty landscape is both a source for finding the secrets of the natural world and a key to a scientific revelation that functions as spiritual enlightenment. But there is no such thing as the frontier freedom that Oppenheimer thought New Mexico’s landscape promised.

Even attempts to dissuade viewers from romanticizing the events of the film reinforce emptiness. In New Mexico, a somber 15-second public service announcement from the Union of Concerned Scientists preceded screenings of Oppenheimer, reminding viewers that nuclear tests contributed to high rates of infant mortality, cancers, and the poisoning of soil and water. The PSA showed a landscape viewed from a passenger train. It evoked Oppenheimer’s ride to the town of Lamy in Nolan’s film, but also could have been Alamogordo, near the test site. The lack of specificity established the scenery as abandoned: modest discolored buildings, absence of people, the toll of a single bell in ambient natural sound.

The concerned scientists likely didn’t intend to glance over the people of New Mexico, but the PSA nevertheless reaffirmed the idea that the state is empty. Is this a result of the bomb’s devastation, or was it always the case? Who used to inhabit this space? Who still does?

Indigenous and Hispano New Mexicans who were present in the region long before Oppenheimer have been the most impacted by the lab. Many New Mexicans know “Downwinders”— residents of the rural Tularosa Valley downwind of the blast who have borne the brunt of the ecological, economic, and negative health outcomes from nuclear testing, but who have yet to receive any formal recognition or reparation from the U.S. government.

Despite those who profit from silence and emptiness, New Mexico is a land of testimony. This state is full of life and full of people who have dedicated their lives to holding each other close. Organizations like Tewa Women United, an all-volunteer organization founded in 1989 that seeks to create and foster spaces that center Indigenous women’s knowledge and health practices, speak to the specific ways the bomb has affected Indigenous communities in the state. The Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe held an entire exhibition devoted to the topic in 2022, orienting viewers toward the global connections and hazardous histories that arise from the first blast of the Atomic Age in New Mexico’s desert.

Telling stories like these is what makes New Mexico a real place—not the empty “Land of Enchantment” packaged for tourists. When you visit, work towards listening, and you’ll begin to see past the vistas.

The post The New Mexico <i>Oppenheimer</i> Erases appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Today, Chacon’s music is having a moment. In 2022, his composition for church organ and ensemble “Voiceless Mass”—a piece that “considers the futility of giving voice to the voiceless, when ceding space is never an option for those in power”—won a Pulitzer Prize. And in August 2023, the MacArthur Foundation awarded Chacon its prestigious “Genius” grant, lauding his “practice that cuts across the boundaries of visual art, performance, and music” to activate “spaces of performance where the histories of the lands the United States has encroached upon can be contemplated, questioned, and reimagined.”

On December 14, Zócalo and partners wasteLAnd, GRoW Annenberg, and ASU Gammage present “How Do We Hear America?,” an evening showcasing performances of two Chacon works: “American Ledger No. 1,” an ensemble piece performed beneath a giant, flag-inspired score that tells the creation story of the U.S.; and “Echo Contest,” a call-and-response duet that plays with notions of distance. The program will take place at the historic ASU California Center, in downtown Los Angeles. (Tickets are free. Sign up here.)

Zócalo’s editorial director Eryn Brown caught up with Chacon over Zoom to talk about the saxophone sitting on his couch, how Los Angeles influences his work, and what it means to be American.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The post Raven Chacon Makes Noise appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Sam is my family’s patriarch, the immigrant who made our branch of the Ravel family American. But he’s notable for a more provocative reason: It’s long been rumored that when Pancho Villa raided the village of Columbus, New Mexico in 1916, he was looking to kill Sam.

Who was Sam? And how did this Jewish immigrant from Lithuania land in a dusty border town and get tangled up with Villa, one of Mexico’s most notorious figures?

Sam Ravel arrived at the port of Galveston, Texas in 1905—one of millions of Jews escaping economic hardship and antisemitic persecution in Eastern Europe. He settled with relatives in El Paso before moving to Columbus in November 1910.

Sam’s arrival in Columbus roughly corresponded with the start of the Mexican Revolution, a decade-long, bloody struggle to end an era of dictatorship in Mexico and establish a constitutional republic. As the leader of the División del Norte, Villa was one of the Revolution’s most prominent, and, to the U.S., proximate leaders.

Sam operated two retail businesses in this town just north of the border: the Commercial Hotel and the Columbus Mercantile Company, which he renamed Sam Ravel & Brothers once his younger siblings, Louis and Arthur, joined him in America. The store sold ammunition, appliances, cleaning supplies, clothing, food, fuel, guns, hides—you name it.

Like their merchandise, their customer base was diverse: Americans, including the local Army troops from Camp Furlong, Mexican civilians, and Mexican revolutionaries jockeying for power. With war south of the border came a military buildup that spurred population growth, which generally made for good business. But on March 9, 1916, the Revolution spilled north onto U.S. soil.  Before dawn, Villa’s army galloped into town, guns blasting, shouting “¡Viva Villa!”

The assault that followed was audacious, and notorious—the only time in the 20th century that the continental United States was invaded by a major foreign army. The Villistas looted Columbus and set fire to several buildings, including the Ravel-owned Commercial Hotel, which burned to the ground. A gunfight erupted between the Villistas and the U.S. Army, and the Villistas retreated by daybreak. The casualties were substantial: Nine local military officers, 10 civilians, and approximately 78 members of Villa’s army lay dead in the streets.

Villa was likely motivated to attack by a constellation of reasons, among them anger that the U.S. had shifted their support from him to his rival, Venustiano Carranza. But more than 100 years later, in both popular narratives and history books, a rumor persists that Villa had come to Columbus because he was enraged at Sam over an arms deal gone wrong. Accounts relay that a contingent of Villistas scoured for Sam, even commandeering his teenage brother Arthur in the search. The revolutionaries never found Sam, because he was in El Paso for a medical appointment.

Was revenge against my grandfather really a motivation for the attack? This bizarre notion has intrigued me ever since I was a child.

To learn more, in March 2016—100 years after the raid—I joined family members in Columbus for the annual memorial commemorating the event. We listened to speakers, took a walking tour of the town, and had lunch across the border in Palomas, Mexico.

I returned home to California with even more questions about Sam, and began my search in earnest. I dove into research, and returned to Columbus to film 2020’s raid commemoration for a documentary I hoped to make. Over a few years, the fuzzy facts of my grandfather’s life came into greater focus.

Ultimately, one of the most fruitful sources of insight into my grandfather was neither scholarly archives nor family lore, but a gift Sam received long ago. It was a glorious, 101-year-old black-page photo album documenting a hunting trip he took with friends in Chihuahua, Mexico in 1921. This album brought me closer to Sam, revealing some of his authentic nature and interests. Over time, I’ve come to feel as if I know my ghostly grandfather in large part due to conserving, examining, and revisiting its photographs and captions.

I first saw the book years ago, during a visit to an aunt in my hometown, San Jose, California. As we reminisced about the Ravels, my aunt pulled the album from a shelf in the family room. The cover was embossed in gold with the words “Snap Shots.” It had likely sat unopened for some time, but it was falling apart. Pages were crumbling. Captions handwritten in white ink were fading.

At the time I worked at Getty Publications, so with my aunt’s permission, I brought the album to work and showed it to a conservator at the Getty Conservation Institute. My colleague advised me to carefully remove the brads that bound the book and were putting pressure on the page edges, to slide each leaf into a clear sleeve, and to store the album in an archival box in a dark closet. Once the album was stabilized, I could examine it more carefully, and frequently, without fear of it disintegrating. I pored over the images and transcribed the annotations.

Created and given to my grandfather by one of his travel mates, the album documents their two-week trip into Mexico in January and February of 1921, mere months after the Revolution ended and just five years after the deadly raid. Villa was still at large.

The book begins with streetscapes of nearby Texas cities, perhaps taken from the window of a westbound train: Main Street in Van Horn, Fort Hancock, and then tiny Yselta, which the unknown author ironically captions “another large town.” Next there is a glimpse of downtown El Paso. Model Ts are parked in front of the stately Hotel Paso del Norte, where people had flocked to the rooftop terrace to watch firefights across the border during the Mexican Revolution.

Sam comes into the picture, literally, on page five. Before studying the album, I had seen only two photographs of him, both studio portraits. In the earlier one—likely taken in Europe before Sam emigrated to America—he is seated next to his two younger brothers. They are somber, wearing dark suits, possibly mourning their mother’s death.

The only other photograph I had seen of Sam is similarly posed, self-conscious and formal. Set in a filigree gold frame that my father kept on his dresser, it now hangs in my house. In this one my grandfather is older, fatter, and with less hair. Again he dons a three-piece suit, but this time it’s accented with a spiffy botanical print tie, and he smiles slightly.

In contrast, the album presents pages of unguarded moments. And while posed—Sam and his friends certainly knew they were being photographed—these images are the antithesis of formal studio portrait photography: casual, spontaneous, even playful.

In one Sam is lined up with a group of men in front of an adobe in Palomas, looking like a still from The Magnificent Seven. It is January 25, 1921, the first night of their journey. In the next photo Sam and two buddies stand before the hut where they bedded down for the night. A cigarette dangles from his right hand; a chicken pecks in the foreground.

Photo by photo I am introduced to their hunting guide, their horses, even their first campsite, where my grandfather postures with a rifle at the ready. He seems unconcerned that Villa is on the loose.

Relatives reported that Sam was gregarious and audacious, and here is evidence: a photo of Sam and his companions stripped down and bathing in a hot spring, their faces plastered with toothy grins. In another shot he gamely cradles a live fox.

Was he hearty, as I imagined an immigrant forging a better life for himself and his siblings, would be? I turned a page and there was my answer, inscribed by the author beneath a scraggly headshot: “Sam Ravel alias cold blooded Sam. He slept comfortably in his underwear while we froze to death with our clothes on and shoes on … and some snorer.”

I eventually made my film about Sam, UnRaveling, and these photographs are the connective tissue—providing levity, context, nuance, and authenticity.  The album was meant as a gift to my grandfather whom I never met, but it was also an enormous gift to me. I have sat with this heavy album in my lap many times, studying its now-delicate pages, as I imagine Sam also did. I linger over the inscription:

With my best wishes to Sam Ravel

Remembrances of our Hunting Trip in Mexico

Jan. and Feb. 1921

The post The Photo Album That Succeeded Where Pancho Villa Failed appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Colette LaBouff, who is executive director of the Taos Center of the Arts as well as poetry editor for Zócalo Public Square, and Zócalo Public Square founder and publisher Gregory Rodriguez opened the evening with brief welcoming remarks. Simon Romero, national correspondent for The New York Times, then kicked off the conversation by discussing how New Mexico’s past continues to play out in its present. For example, while a right-wing militia group involved in detaining migrant families at the border was swiftly condemned by New Mexico state officials, this was in sharp contrast to how the states of Arizona and Texas treated similar paramilitary groups. Romero asked the evening’s panelists to explain what makes New Mexico different from its neighbors—particularly in how it approaches interference in its affairs and human rights violations?

University of Colorado historian and Center of the American West faculty director Patricia Limerick started by saying, “It is really lucky for the United States that New Mexico is a part of it.” She urged the rest of the country to look to New Mexico to find “a world of richness and complexity,” manifested in the state’s population that includes diverse groups of Native Americans, Mexican-Americans, and Mexican immigrants “with different layers of arrival,” Limerick said. This complexity resists simple-minded analysis and the state’s social intricacy makes it a place “where you have to keep thinking,” as well as a “hazardous zone for simple categories.”

Throughout the evening, the theme and effects of conquest were never far from the panelists’ minds. New Mexico Historical Review editor Durwood Ball said that while the Mexican surrender of New Mexico, which took place in 1846 during the Mexican-American War, is described as a “bloodless conquest,” the real war came afterward. And while we recognize the seven or eight U.S. soldiers who were killed in the 1847 Taos Revolt in response to the surrender, we don’t often talk about the 150 Hispanos and Pueblos who were killed when U.S. forces breached a wall in the church in Taos Pueblo where they had taken refuge. “Make no mistake,” Ball said, “there was a nasty, nasty war.”

And it was only after conquest that the area’s borders were drawn. Limerick said that the drawing of lines seems like a dull matter, but in fact “it’s an amazing act of human exaggeration.” In order to master a place, a conqueror needs to create borders. In the case of New Mexico, this meant making the territory smaller and cutting it into pieces that were easier to govern, which, for example, led to the creation of the Arizona territory.

But why did it take over half a century for New Mexico to be admitted into the Union? One reason, Limerick believes, is that the U.S. thought bringing New Mexico into the nation would bring “too many ‘dark people.’” It wasn’t until what she described as, “forty years of tutelage, of bringing the ‘dark people up’ to standards,” that President Theodore Roosevelt advocated for New Mexico at the beginning of the 20th century—a campaign that eventually resulted in statehood in 1912.

After New Mexico became a state, the effects of New Mexico’s past didn’t simply vanish, but became an intrinsic part of New Mexican identity. Romero pointed back in history to another defining uprising—the Pueblo Revolt of 1680—when the indigenous Pueblos expelled the Spanish colonizers for more than a decade.

Pablo Mitchell, Oberlin College historian and author of Coyote Nation, described the revolt as an “incredibly successful revolution.” And even though the Spanish came back, the missionaries no longer went out to the pueblos, which Mitchell said held the Spanish off “from coming into their villages and trying to transform them, often in violent ways.” Mitchell said it is this legacy—“of Native people holding onto their land, holding onto their autonomy within different pueblos in New Mexico,”—which is different than what happened in other parts of the country and continues to resonate in the state today.

New Mexican identity was—and still remains—an untidy concept. Ball explained that the racial complexity of the Hispanos, Native Americans, and Anglos was “beyond anything the United States could manage.” After all, many of these people were of Mexican descent, which posed a real problem for the United States. From the beginning, Ball said, “Nuevo Mexicanos resisted white supremacy” and considered themselves “involuntary citizens of the United States.” While the state is politically incorporated with the U.S., Ball said that socially and culturally it is not. New Mexico, Ball explained, “is an incomplete project of our government, and it makes our president crazy.”

In particular, Mitchell said, whiteness never had the same power in New Mexico that it did and does in other places in the U.S. “Whites never had the control in New Mexico that they had elsewhere; they were never able to push the Native peoples out; they were never able to push the Hispanos and Hispanas out.”

As New Mexican identity evolved over time, many present-day New Mexicans are of mixed Hispanic, Anglo, and Native heritage. Intermarriage has long been a part of New Mexican’s history, and while some marriages might have been for love, intermarriage was often strategic—on the part of both Anglos and Hispanos—who saw the monetary benefit in having a son or daughter-in-law who could give the family access to new business opportunities. This notion of “money as a motive” to promote “more open encounters of people,” Limerick said, was ultimately positive because of the dynamic culture that it created.

Limerick closed the discussion with a story about a U.S. soldier, James Byrne, whom she “carries a torch for.” In the late 19th century, Byrne was visiting Santa Fe, and he asked for directions in English. When the people he asked only responded to him in Spanish, Byrne was frustrated. But, Limerick said, he wrote in his memoir that it “suddenly occurred to [him] this was their country.”

In response to a question from the audience about the spirit of resistance in New Mexico among both Native Americans and Hispanos, the panel started to discuss the state’s history of seeing itself in opposition to both nearby Texas and to American practices like slavery, which Mexico abolished in 1824. “Resistance occurs on all different levels,” Mitchell summed up, and historians need to be alert for signs of what’s going on beneath the surface. Mentioning local Taos Navajo artist R.C. Gorman, he said we need to dig more deeply—“How do we start to think about art differently when we start looking at it through a lens of resistance and endurance?”

The post Is New Mexico an ‘Incomplete Project’ of the United States? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

This system of unfree labor came into existence in the 1700s, when the region was still a colony of Spain. By the time that American military forces occupied the area in 1846, during the Mexican-American War, debt peonage had become deeply entrenched in society and culture. The United States thus inherited the system when, as a result of that war, it gained permanent possession of what is today California, Arizona, Nevada, Utah, and New Mexico. Peonage would persist there even after the Civil War, demonstrating the complexities of America’s struggle for abolition.

Peonage was especially prominent in New Mexico, where lower-class citizens often fell into debt out of sheer necessity. Sometimes a small loan from a wealthier landholder would be necessary for basic subsistence or shelter. Just as commonly, a debt originated with Roman Catholic priests, who charged exorbitant amounts of money to perform weddings, baptisms, and funerals. In order to marry one’s sweetheart, anoint a child in the church, or bury a deceased relative, a cash-poor person had no choice but to seek a loan from a person of financial means.

Those loans bound men and women to servitude in repayment of debt. The interest rates were manipulated in such a way that the full amount could never be repaid, thus ensuring a lifetime of bondage to one’s creditor. Servitude was hereditary. When peons died before the obligation had been satisfied, their children could be forced to labor for the same master.

Unlike slavery in the American South, peonage in New Mexico had no racial prerogative. In fact, peons shared much in common with their masters, including nationality (all were considered citizens), race and ethnicity (all were Hispanic), language (all spoke Spanish), and religion (all were Catholic). The most significant difference between master and servant was socioeconomic status and land ownership.

People who fell into servitude as peons were forced to conduct a variety of tasks, which typically depended on age and gender. Women and children usually did domestic chores within a household. Working-age men would be sent into the fields at planting and harvesting times, or into the pastures and prairies to tend flocks of sheep or herds of livestock.

The most well-known example of this hacienda-style aristocracy was the vast spread of Lucien Bonaparte Maxwell. On his immense land grant in northern New Mexico, Maxwell had hundreds of peons who tended his herds and tilled his fields in the Cimarron River Valley.

When American newcomers traveled through antebellum New Mexico, they could not help but draw comparisons between places like Maxwell’s estate and slave plantations in the South. After reading comparisons between debt bondage and chattel slavery, and learning of New Mexico’s statutory protection of involuntary servitude, Northern abolitionists took aim at peonage in the 1850s. Newspaper editorialists informed readers that the institution resembled the South’s chattel slavery. “It applies to all colors, shades and complexions, from the pure white to the sooty African,” wrote one New Yorker. “The creditor has as much command over the labor of the debtor, as the Southern slaveholder has over that of the negro.”

Similar comparisons arose in Congress, where one northerner gave a speech proclaiming that New Mexico’s peons “are in a worse condition of slavery than our negroes, and would be happy to change places with them.” Even U.S. Representative Thaddeus Stevens, one of the nation’s most outspoken abolitionists, targeted this alternative system of slavery. “Peonage,” he quipped, “saves the poor man’s cow to furnish milk for his children, by selling the father instead of the cow.”

Such negative publicity struck fear in New Mexico’s servant-holding class. So in 1851, the territorial legislature passed a law to protect debt peonage against the onslaughts of antislavery activists. This so-called “Master-Servant Law,” in laying out the legal parameters for relations between creditors and debtors, borrowed some of its provisions from slave codes and fugitive slave acts in the United States.

Under this new law, peons who failed to perform assigned tasks could be imprisoned at the request of the master. Local authorities had a legal obligation to chase down, arrest, and punish runaway peons. Masters were also protected from criminal prosecution in the event that they abused a servant who refused to work or attempted to escape. The law concluded with an ode to the patriarchal nature of the system: “all male or female servants shall respect their masters as their superior guardians.”

The overarching national significance of the controversy over debt peonage would not become clear until the 1860s, when the Civil War and Reconstruction prompted a seismic shift in the nature of American democracy. In 1865, the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution specifically prohibited slavery and involuntary servitude.

This landmark event has traditionally been viewed as the moment at which slavery ceased to exist in the United States. In the Hispanic Southwest, however, peonage outlived the Thirteenth Amendment because masters defined debtor servitude as a strictly voluntary condition of labor and ignored the new emancipation order.

The defiance of New Mexico’s “slaveholding class” drew the immediate attention of Radical Republicans in Congress, as well as President Andrew Johnson. A nation that had fought a Civil War for the principles of freedom and democracy could not, in these men’s eyes, continue to tolerate involuntary labor, in any form. In direct response to the persistence of peonage in the Southwest, Congress passed an act in 1867—and Johnson quickly signed it into law—that explicitly banned peonage throughout the United States. Largely as a result of this federal “Peon Law,” the peculiar institution of debtor servitude, which had existed in New Mexico for generations, reached its gradual end. By the 1870s, most peons had been freed.

The country’s transition from slavery to free labor was not nearly as simple as an Emancipation Proclamation or an amendment to the Constitution. Other forms of bound labor—including debt peonage—survived the war, and prompted a sweeping legal and political reassessment of how Americans defined involuntary servitude. It also brought a deeper understanding that slavery was and would remain an American problem that would require sustained attention, because it transcended any particular era or ethnic group.

The abolition of peonage is a reminder of the political discord that attended the 19th-century struggle to emancipate more than four million slaves, which included not just African Americans but also Hispanics and even Native Americans. This fight to eliminate alternative modes of enslavement symbolized the nation’s ongoing resolve to form a more perfect union wherein the Constitutional ideals of freedom encompassed an increasingly diverse range of citizens.

The emancipatory crusade that started with the nation’s first peon law in 1867 remains imperfect. Various permutations of peonage still exist in the 21st century, prompting repeated amendments to the U.S. Code. The most recent modification, added in October 2000, mandates that “whoever holds or returns any person to a condition of peonage” will be subject to stiff penalties, including fines and up to 20 years’ imprisonment.

Today, debt bondage is commonly associated with human trafficking and is especially prominent in California, where thousands of undocumented immigrants from Asia and Latin America are indentured into long-term conditions of subversive sweatshop labor and even prostitution. Thus, the abolition of coercive servitude and the expansion of human rights that began in the Civil War era is an unfinished social and cultural revolution in which American citizens continue to play an active role.

The post How New Mexico’s “Peons” Became Enslaved to Debt appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

______________

A pickup in the distance drags a cloud of dust
down the road, its motion slowed by our shared direction.
Alongside us run the freight lines—all the trains
shaped like their toys, except the graffiti covering
the red and silver siding. The Santa Fe logo in a font
I recognize like familiar handwriting.

Out here, each creosote thinks it’s a crown.

Our train’s approach sends
sand hill cranes into the sky
where they wheel like lazy kites
as another desert sunset burns
on the horizon like a Catholic heart.

______________

In the gorge that ran down from Picacho Peak,
the cattle bones scared me
to the marrow: a cow crumpled
as if fallen from the sky. I kicked
the ribcage and it rolled onto its back,
I walked home warily
tracing the bumps
that make up my elbow.

Clouds smoldered like embers in the fading sky
behind Mom watering the fruit trees.
I let her tell me stories about distant cousins, thinking
of death all along, how it meant the earth
would rearrange my body any way it pleased.

______________

As the train rocks on the curves,
I look back to the yellow lights
of the windows behind me.

We probably move through
night like a gold wand.

______________

When I was six, a lizard
I grabbed left its tail
squirming in my pinched fingers.
With a timid guilt I told Mom, and she said,
It’ll grow back, Hon. So I punched holes
in the lid of a mason jar, placed
the tail inside and waited,
but the lizard never reappeared.

______________

After 14 hours sitting upright I’m
half crazed that these cabin seats
don’t recline. The battery in my cheap
reading light fades, along with every
word in my precious journal.

______________

Running down an arroyo I fell
and scraped open my left palm—
grey dust smeared
into the red of blood—
I felt another desert
inside me, an aching
dryness and a panic
for water from our green garden hose.

Mom, I think of telling you
a hundred things I never have
in every voice I’ve ever owned,
everything I’ve kept from you
for little or no reason,
and in my chest
an orchard is flooding.

______________

Outside the window’s cold glass, darkness
soaks the creosotes, but in my head
I’m blinking under the bright green
of your fruit trees’ shaggy leaves.

The cabin fills with warm air
and long breaths exhaled in sleep.
The wheels click louder on the curves
as we move, motionless
inside this tremendous speed.

The post Train From New Mexico appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

My mouth was numbed with spice from pulverized chiles. So many outdoor comals, toasting so many tortillas, extracting the caramel from so many thinly sliced onions, lined the streets of the small towns, and I felt compelled to pull the car to the side of the road, stop, and eat from each one. I’m here, I told myself, to eat all the chile sauce I can. I’d spent most of the season on the road, conducting research across America for a book that begins each chapter with a foodstuff typical of a state, and digresses from there. But what I was concerned with at the moment was winter—particularly, how even among all of this sun-cooked cacti, the holiday season was bound to a dominant narrative, one that depended on images of snow, rosy cheeks, exhalations condensing like ghosts in the air before us.

Winter is coming to an end now, but I still can’t help thinking about how in America—in song and story, TV commercial and dream—the season is white. And when the Earth itself doesn’t manufacture snow, we do it ourselves, with machines named Snow Gun, American Output, Atomic Chill. When I arrived in Tularosa’s town square, I saw one such snow machine spewing its cold manufactured flurries into the air. I parked the car along the square’s southern border, watched as a team of smocked volunteers worked with inadequate gloves to mound the snow into piles from which children, for a few coins, could pack snowballs for the throwing.

The line for the snowballs was long and snaking. Up front, a 7-year-old girl forked over her mother’s money and built a pathetic 8-inch snowman with the aid of a rigid burlap mold, under the supervision of a beautiful red-vested volunteer with matching red Santa Claus barrettes. Behind this odd snow station, a skinny teenage boy stood behind a pot-bellied beast of an instrument—a harmonichord, the premature offspring of piano and violin, wide as a park bench—and, with the aid of a hand-crank, elicited a pathetic winter circus tune.

I got out of the car, and crossed the square to be closer to the music. A small girl ran up to me, blew soap bubbles into my face through a blue plastic wand. She wore no shoes. Her mother, younger than I was, touched my arm, said, in barely-accented English, “Don’t be sad.”

But I couldn’t help it. Behind this version of winter, there was that other: nuclear winter. On July 16, 1945, Tularosa had shuddered in the aftermath of the nearby Trinity atomic bomb test. Ash rained over the residents after the blast, and their bodies incubated rare forms of cancer as they picnicked and played soccer and celebrated birthdays on poisoned ground decorated with radioactive green trinitite glass. Some residents collected—and still collect—this glass and set it on their mantelpieces, because, in spite of its toxicity, it is so beautiful.

At the other end of the fake snow-covered square, couples ice-skated in tank tops, tube-sled down squat radioactive hills. I wondered what compels us to sacrifice our bodies to things we deem beautiful. I wondered how many fingers we’ve lost to the frostbite because we couldn’t stop ourselves from touching the snow.

Tularosa’s residents at the time of the bomb test primarily were descendants of Mexican farmers. In the 1840s, following the Mexican-American War, these farmers were bemused to find that they now lived in the United States, even though their houses remained fixed. It was a devotion to Manifest Destiny that allowed America to justify embellishing its borders—a belief that we had a divine right to owning whatever we please. In raining down nuclear ash on their families a century later, our impulse was the same: a pursuit of a fresh national personality, that of global superpower, with the ability to defend the borders it fabricated.

In coldness—even this forced coldness—we can feel this atrocious American ideal anatomically. As we shiver, as our hairs stand on end, as our teeth chatter, the atomic electricity within us compels our flesh to rise into goosebumps, hundreds of little piloerections running from neck’s nape down to chest and shoulders. We gain such a barely noticeable elevation, expanding, imperialistically, that much further into air that once belonged to other molecules. In coldness, we can tell ourselves that we’re celebrating the sort of cockeyed, diverse heritage that only bears the illusion of singularity.

In this conversation between body and weather, past and present, the electricity within us communicates with the electricity without—the streetlamps and telephone wires, the generators and grids, the charges and currents and fields and magnetism, the neons and the fluorescents, the gases both noble and peasant, the potential and static, the kinetic and flowing. The nuclear weapons. The snow machines. We’re as dizzy as in a dream, our bodies blossoming as they quake.

In this way, and in this weather, we can time travel—sense the energies of the past and future, our bodies, as our ideals and empires, expanding, even as they implode.

This is who we are, I thought, as I picked chile skins from my teeth with my tongue, as the flakes of fake snow whirled above, drawing lassoes or nooses or mushroom clouds onto the sky. We appropriate. We make of things what they’re not in order to gel with a dominant narrative. Because the borders have been redrawn, because we are a superpower both militaristically and commercially, winter, here, must be cold, in order to fit in.

And now there I was, once again bound to appropriation, however different the scale, trying—as so many have before me—to claim brief ownership of this place, via chiles, definitions of winter, and a chapter in a book. Even as I felt terrible about this, I didn’t know how to avoid it; how to avoid asserting some sort of malign dominance in my compulsion to girdle all of these elements into a delusional thesis. So, like most of us, I ate chiles, and watched the fake snow gyrate, and took my notes, and made no difference. I am American, after all, wedging my quiet violence up into the crevices of apathy. My writing did none of these people any good. I was a peeping tom, both entitled to peep yet somehow still unworthy, fogging up the glass of history, other people’s milieus. I spat chile skins to the cobblestone and licked my lips. I watched.

To her mother’s snapping camera, the 7-year-old girl with the snowman beamed as the barretted employee supplied her with small pieces of cork and a reusable string of carrot to stick into her creation’s face. Machine-pumped flakes waltzed around her head, collecting in her black hair. She knew, as I knew—if only via goosebumps, and some inexplicable and unpleasant smell—the testing of the limits of human invention isn’t quite over, nor is our compulsion to name the ultimately destructive after the holy. Slaughter renamed destiny. A bomb called Trinity.

Though this world was melting quickly, and the girl was already being ushered out to allow for the next child, her face, as if trapped in a mold of its own, would endure its smile.

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German was her native language; Yiddish as well. Julia Staab was a German Jew from a small village in Prussia. I don’t know how her marriage to my great-great-grandfather Abraham Staab came about—if it was arranged beforehand, or if they chose each other. But I do know that they were in a hurry to begin their married life in Santa Fe—to inhabit their American Dream.

Abraham was, anyway. He had left their village a decade earlier, at 15, to make his fortune. That he did, hauling merchandise—“Hats Boots & Shoes, Hardware, Groceries etc. etc.”—along the Santa Fe Trail between St. Louis and the American Southwest. He became a U.S. citizen on July 10, 1865, only a few weeks after the last shots of the Civil War were fired, and promptly departed for Germany in search of a bride. My great-great-grandparents married on Christmas Day, 1865. Julia was 21 years old, Abraham 26.

Julia and Abraham Staab

They shipped out on the RMS Scotia, a luxury liner that was at the time the fastest ship on the Atlantic, and on January 12, they landed in New York. From there, they climbed onto a train, and then a steamboat, and then rode for two weeks in a stagecoach across the snow-cloaked Great Plains to make a life among New Mexico’s stark and rugged Sangre de Cristo Mountains.

Santa Fe, in 1866, was not yet the elegant city of artists and tourists and well-heeled retirees. It was a rough and unruly town, sandy and treeless. Its central plaza was crowded with carts, wagons, teamsters, roustabouts, soldiers, veterans, fortune-seekers, consumptives, Navajos, Apaches, Jewish merchants, freed slaves, miners, gamblers, prostitutes, shysters, horses, burros, pigs, and goats—a confusion of commerce, a babel of languages. The houses were constructed of mud, the streets clouded with billowing dust. Beyond the town’s edges stretched a bewildering landscape of uncompromising sky and chisel-topped cerritos, so different from anything a young bride from the green and gentle valleys of northwestern Germany would ever have seen. New Mexico was all tans and reds, the ground littered with rocks and reptiles, with hematite-seeped rocks and bleached bones and spiny flora—cactus, greasewood, Spanish bayonet.

This desert was, certainly, an unforgiving land. But it was nonetheless a place that seemed willing to forgive the fact that Julia and Abraham were Jews. In Lügde, the village in which they were raised, local records describe a 1866 cholera outbreak that killed “126 people and one Jew.” That Jew was Julia’s cousin Philipp Schuster—singled out because, in Julia’s time, a Jew in Lügde was not a person but an invasive species, taxed and fined and snubbed at every turn.

Julia Schuster Staab

Not so in Santa Fe. In the New Mexico that Julia encountered in 1866, the newspapers of the territory spoke kindly of the local Jews (“Many of the best residents are of the Jewish faith,” wrote the Santa Fe New Mexican). Perhaps this was because the Jewish merchants were advertisers, or perhaps because there weren’t enough of them to seem threatening. There were, in Santa Fe, no temples, no Hebrew schools, no Jewish ghettos. The stores stayed open on Saturdays; a rabbi traveled from Denver every few years to circumcise the boys. My great-grandmother Bertha’s diaries from those days mention riding parties and sewing circles and teas and Christmas celebrations with gentile and Jewish friends alike—champagne and oysters, boxes at the Albuquerque opera. But not once in the diary did she mention the fact that her family was Jewish. It didn’t seem to matter.

The Staabs were American. They occupied the heart of Santa Fe, with a huge storefront right on the Plaza and a towering family mansion—a mansard-roofed French Second Empire–style brick building—just a few blocks away. The three Staab girls rode sidesaddle and carried gold-headed riding crops. The four boys wore tennis whites and striped sweaters. Abraham was elected county commissioner twice; he helped bring the railroad, the gasworks, and the territorial prison to Santa Fe. He prospered alongside this former Mexican outpost: brick by brick, railroad tie by railroad tie, he worked to transform Santa Fe from a foreign colony into an American city. The town was parched and unkempt and far from the “civilized” world. But Abraham flourished in that hard soil.

Julia did not. She struggled there; indeed, she seemed to wither in the desert. She bore seven children in quick succession, and lost an eighth. She suffered miscarriages and health problems, and from “hysteria,” as they called it then. Whenever she fell into a decline, she traveled to Germany to recover, visiting health spas and German doctors and her many sisters who lived there and tended her when she was unwell. Julia was the only one of the family’s eight girls to leave Germany. She felt terribly unlucky to have done so.

In her last years, Julia shut herself in the upstairs bedroom of the European brick home her husband had built among the adobes, and never left. While the family celebrated weddings on the ground floor, she stayed upstairs in her room, and she died there in 1896. It is said that her ghost still haunts the building. And that she was also haunted: by the life she might have lived in Germany, and all that she had left behind.

Of course we, who came after, know what became of all that she left behind—what became of her nieces and nephews and of her sister Emilie, who lived long enough to die, at the age of 81, in a Nazi concentration camp. We know how it ended. And we are haunted by a ghost life, too—the life that might have been ours, had Abraham not dragged Julia across the ocean and plains to this open desert land.

Abraham Staab

To become American is to accept a staggering loss of self—of the people we once were, in the places we once came from. It may take a generation, perhaps two. But inevitably, it transpires. The surge of conquering culture sweeps down through the generations, much as the spring floods scour the desert arroyos. Washed away, we must lay down new roots.

Julia believed her life in the desert was a curse. But five generations downstream, I find that I can’t agree with her. That sere and serrated Western landscape is the only place I have ever felt at home. My father and grandfather came from there; my great-grandmother too. The high desert is in my blood. And I can only see that it was a blessing.

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At 8:30, I hop on the bicycle and ride about 12 blocks to the yoga studio where I’ll teach my first yoga class of the day; I’ll teach three classes today. In between, I’ll write, read, prepare for yoga classes by watching a video or writing new sequences. Then grocery shopping, laundry, putting away the dishes from last night’s dinner and this morning’s breakfast. At the supermarket, I’ll eye the seasonal potted plants—pansies, geraniums, and even lavender—and then I’ll keep on walking, think skip it. Those flowers will never withstand the summer heat coming.

I cannot say that I love Roswell, New Mexico. But I can say that I love what it has done for me.

I left Orange County—Irvine—in 2011 just a few weeks shy of having worked in an administrative position at the university for 10 years. Since I was a student before that—with two graduate degrees—I had been around the university for more than 20. Through the years, Southern California seeped deep into every corner of my life and skin: I’d grown up in Redondo Beach, and I’d lived in Hermosa Beach, San Clemente, San Pedro. I’d gone to Loyola Marymount University, a school on the bluffs that held a magical city view. These were beautiful, fast-moving places with waves and surfers and people working their asses off to afford living where they did.

For five minutes—at the most—I looked at my departure from Southern California as some kind of failure. Checking out. I was excusing myself from the races—to be a professor one day, a professional, an up-and-coming something, a writer in a thriving community. But that feeling dissipated as soon as I realized that giving up the competition was pure relief. As soon as the highway opened and a red rock or two appeared. As soon as I crossed what felt like a never-going-back marker at the state of New Mexico’s border: Welcome to enchantment. A panic fell away as I drove. A quiet set in to match the openness.

My father likes to say that the move took years off me. He’s talking about the lines in my face. I’m pretty sure he’s wrong about the lines (which seem deeper from age and the harsh wind and sun), but I think I smile a lot more than I did in the Golden State.

In Roswell, I started teaching yoga, something I’d been trained to do but had never done. Within a year, I was teaching 15 to 20 classes a week. Most yoga teachers will tell you this is a crazy schedule, but I dug in, felt strongly that I was building something. There was room to grow and do something that I loved and wanted to share.

Was I stressed by this teaching load? Not the way I remember in California. I was just bone-tired. There was no commute—you can cross Roswell in 15 minutes. Nothing to see once you’d seen the museums—including the UFO Museum, the Spring River Zoo, and the refuge known as Bitter Lake. And there was nowhere to go. Roswell is about three hours, give or take some minutes, from any other “city,” and there is next to nothing between it and the next place. Lubbock. Amarillo. Las Cruces. Santa Fe. Albuquerque. Take your pick. Or just stay home.

Here, you choose your company carefully; we are all we have.

About four months after I moved to Roswell, I was teaching yoga at the local community college. At the end of one session, a man walked in; I figured that he was waiting for a student. But they filed out, and he stayed. He’d come over from his office and introduced himself because he’d heard, from more than one person, about that yoga teacher who moved here from California. About a month later, he took me to hear Mozart, and five months later we were married.

Neither of us is from here, but here we are.

There’s nothing glamorous about our lives in Roswell. He teaches math, and I teach yoga. He shoots in marksmanship competitions, and I write. We ride bicycles together and read to each other. We each cook three nights a week and never go out. On the day neither of us cooks, we sometimes get pad Thai from the Thai barbecue place across the street. We love whatever they’ve done to the dish, but it’s not pad Thai.

Are there struggles? For sure. It’s hard to make it as a yoga teacher anywhere. How do we make the new car payment? How do we afford, and take time from work, to see our loved ones who live in Seattle, Los Angeles, and Minneapolis? If we feel suffocated in this small town (there is no real bookstore), we get some perspective by driving to Albuquerque for the night. There we hit Trader Joe’s, take a yoga class, and drive home. And we’re always glad to be back.

I don’t miss Southern California when I remember the fever pitch. When I visit, I let cars pass me. Get ahead to what?, I keep wondering. I know I once felt that way, too—that need to make it wherever I was going first. I think back to the Saturday morning I got a speeding ticket on the 405 Freeway trying to get to Venice for a yoga class. Sitting in traffic for 90 minutes to get to a 90-minute yoga class. Speeding. A ticket. A fine that nearly surpassed my car payment.

But I do miss the view of the Korean Bell of Friendship and the Pacific behind it in San Pedro, the L.A. port-noise, the small cove in Corona del Mar, Laguna Canyon hikes. The throng of migrating birds coursing over Back Bay in winter. Bird of Paradise—with their deep blue—in my mother’s backyard.

We probably won’t be in Roswell forever. But I cannot see myself going back.

Home feels like learning to sit with what is—even if that’s not much. Nothing to do but think. Write. Take a nap. When things get really quiet, I reach for my favorites—carried from California—some Patanjali’s The Yoga Sutras or Montaigne’s The Complete Essays. Either one helps me let go of whatever it was I remember hanging onto in the bigger city. On the topic of solitude, Montaigne quotes Tibullus: “In lonely places, be a crowd unto yourself.”

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One reason may be that he was the last of the great tribal leaders to surrender. But there is more to it than that. How else to explain the continuing resonance of his name? As recently as 2011, in the operation that ended the life of the world’s leading terrorist, Geronimo was the code name for Osama bin Laden.

Another explanation lies in the narrative of Geronimo that has come down to us today: that he was a valiant Apache chief fighting for the preservation of his homeland against invading whites. That is a myth. His homeland was southwestern New Mexico, but he spent most of his adult life in Mexico.

The real story goes like this. Under the tutelage of Mangas Coloradas, Geronimo grew into a courageous, skilled fighting man who terrorized Arizona and New Mexico, Sonora and Chihuahua, with destructive and murderous raids that took many lives and huge stores of plunder. Other Chiricahua Apache fighting men did the same. But thanks largely to the newspapers, Geronimo’s name came to define the Apache menace of the 1870s and 1880s.

A large element of the explanation for Geronimo’s persistent fame lies in his on-again, off-again connection to an Indian reservation: Arizona’s White Mountain Apache Reservation, also called the San Carlos Reservation. Three times Geronimo settled on the reservation, and three times he broke free and, with few or many followers, left a path of murderous destruction as he fled south into Mexico, where he intimately knew all the hiding places in the towering Sierra Madre. Army units tried to head him off on these murderous escapes but failed to stop him. The turmoil created by these breakouts provided journalists with plenty of sensational material for their columns, and his name rapidly spread to newspapers throughout the nation.

After the final breakout in the spring of 1885, a two-year effort (sometimes called a war but hardly deserving of the label) sought to run Geronimo and his followers down. It occurred almost entirely in Mexico, with U.S. Army units accomplishing little more than bogging themselves down in the rugged, humid, rainy country that Geronimo knew so well.

Unable to capture or kill Geronimo, the military turned to Apache scouts, who would have more success—through conversation, not fighting. In September 1886, two of those Apache scouts, led by Lieutenant Charles Gatewood, persuaded an exhausted Geronimo that the time had come to surrender. The scouts and the Army, in their pursuit, had worn down the Apaches.

After the surrender, Geronimo and his followers spent the next 23 years as prisoners of war, first in Florida, then in Alabama, and finally at Fort Sill, Oklahoma. There, Geronimo died in 1909 at the age of 86.

Explaining Geronimo as a person is difficult. One large reason is the scarcity of sources. He was 54 before he came to the white public’s attention. Before that, only his flawed autobiography and one other Apache source tell much about him. After that, an abundance of sources, both white and Apache, tell who he was. But those accounts are so varied that what stands out are his contradictions.

In the last years of his life Geronimo—an adherent of the supreme Apache deity, Usen, or Life-Giver—attended the sermons of Dutch Reformed missionaries, announced that he had adopted the “Jesus Road,” and allowed himself to be baptized. Geronimo was a medicine man who dispensed herbal remedies, made generous use of sacred pollen, and performed healing rituals in full view of onlookers, yet when stricken with a mild form of syphilis, he turned to an American army doctor for treatment. While revered by so many, Geronimo was suspicious of nearly all people, including his fellow Apaches; he had a taste for gossip and a willingness to believe any rumor or gossip that might impact his life. And he would lie to anyone if it suited his purposes.

Strikingly, it was the 23 years Geronimo and his followers spent as prisoners of war that cemented his status as icon, both for Indians and whites. The Apaches believed universally that Geronimo possessed extraordinary power. Some tribesmen vowed that they had seen him change the weather to his advantage. Others told of his ability to sense events far away.

Among whites, he became a celebrity. He adapted to conditions in Florida, Alabama, and Fort Sill, Oklahoma. He was allowed to travel to world expositions, fairs, and other public venues. He sold his craftwork and put himself on display to people curious to see the great Apache butcher. He even rode with four chiefs of other tribes in Theodore Roosevelt’s inaugural parade in 1905. Our last photograph of him depicts him in a top hat behind the steering wheel of an early-model touring car.

Geronimo enjoyed the acclaim, but above all he wanted to go back to Arizona and New Mexico. But this the white people, and therefore Congress, would not allow.

The post Why We Keep Saying ‘Geronimo!’ appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.