
The University of New Mexico
NEWS RELEASE
Contact: Carolyn Gonzales 277-5920
cgonzal@unm.edu
Nov. 8, 2007
UNM Sociologist Explores New Mexican Culture and Place in New Anthology
Four UNM Professors Contribute Essays
Phillip B. Gonzales, University of New Mexico professor of sociology and associate dean for faculty in the College of Arts
and Sciences, edited a new anthology, “Expressing New Mexico: Nuevomexicano Creativity, Ritual, and Memory,” a 2007 University of Arizona Press publication. The anthology presents a fresh examination of New Mexico’s varied, deeply historical and highly contested Hispanic culture.
“The impetus behind the project came from a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, part of which called for original studies of such rituals as the matachines, acequias, the Santa Fe Fiesta, as well as film representation, creative writing, and identity politics including Albuquerque’s Oñate controversy,” Gonzales said.
Four other UNM faculty members are among the contributors: Sylvia Rodriguez, anthropology; Enrique Lamadrid, Spanish and Portuguese and Chicano/ Mexicano/Hispano Studies; A. Gabriel Melendez, American Studies; and Tey Diana Rebolledo, Spanish and Portuguese.
The rich and diverse cultures of Nuevomexicanos were forged by Spanish speaking residents over the course of many centuries. Expressing New Mexico contributes to a present-day renaissance of research on Nuevomexicano culture by assembling eleven original, noteworthy essays. They are grouped under two broad headings: “expressing culture” and “expressing place.” Expressing culture derives from the notion of “expressive culture,” referring to “fine art” productions, such as music, painting, sculpture, drawing, dance, drama, and film, but it is expanded here to include folklore, religious ritual, community commemoration, ethnopolitical identity and the pragmatics of ritualized response to the difficult problems of everyday life.
Intertwined with the concept of expressive culture is “place” in relation to New Mexico itself. Place is addressed directly by four authors and is present in varying degrees in the rest. Place figures prominently in Nuevomexicano “character,” contributors argue. They assert that Nuevomexicano/as construct and develop a sense of self that is shaped by the state’s geography and culture as well as by heritage.
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