The Lectures:
Monday, March 31, 7:15 p.m.
Teofilo Ruiz, “The Old World and the New: Sites of Encounters and Cultural Production”
Ruiz sets the series in motion by examining first encounters between Europeans and Native Americans following Columbus’s discovery of the ocean route to the Americas. He will describe how new cultural forms were created in the Americas as a result of colonization and imposition of European (and essentially Castilian) social and cultural structures. A special feature of his lecture is his account of the confrontations between Spaniards and natives of the Caribbean and of Mexico. He also shows that Mexican Aztecs were originally immigrants from what is now the Southwestern United States. He will steadily narrow his focus, ending in New Mexico as he examines how the cultural forms created in the Valley of Mexico traveled north.
Tuesday, April 1, 5:15 p.m.
Brian Vallo, “Complex Connections: Pueblo and Catholic Symbols and Stories”
With the forceful influence of European culture and religion on aboriginal peoples of the Southwest, indigenous religious practices of the Pueblo Indian communities were forever changed. Nearly 500 years later, Pueblo Indian people of New Mexico maintain an acceptance and understanding of Catholicism while sustaining their own inherent sacred life. In his lecture, Brian Vallo focuses on observances and symbols of the Catholic faith incorporated into “Pueblo” culture, and evolved into significant community observances and family traditions. Most of the ethnographic and historical information Vallo presents was collected from published materials and through interviews with Pueblo elders, including Joe Sando of Jemez Pueblo, who in 2007 received an honorary doctorate from UNM.
Tuesday, April 1, 7:15 p.m.
Amy G. Remensnyder, “A Medieval Story from New Mexico: Santa Fe’s Conquering Virgin Mary”
The enduring importance of Virgin Mary in New Mexico’s cultural life is clear from incidents in Santa Fe’s politics during the last two decades. Twice the city rocked with controversies over images of the Virgin. In 1992, Pueblos clashed with Hispanos over the provocative name of the 16th- or 17th-century statue of the Virgin Mary enshrined in Santa Fe’s cathedral, La Conquistadora. A few years later, furor erupted over a sexually suggestive digital image of the Virgin of Guadalupe made by the Chicana artist Alma Lopez and included in an exhibit at the International Museum of Folk Art.
Both controversies reflect modern dilemmas—soul-searching occasioned by the quincentenary of Columbus’s arrival in the New World, and the place of sexuality in representing sacred figures. But during these conflicts, the weight of Mary’s long history in New Mexico, stretching back to the earliest days of Spanish colonization, was also apparent. This is a Marian history that crosses the Atlantic to go back to medieval Spain itself—the roots of both controversial images lie in the world of medieval Europe.
In her lecture, Remensnyder explores the history of Santa Fe’s La Conquistadora and her antecedents in both colonial Mexico and medieval Castile to show the medieval European contribution to the role Mary plays in New Mexico. She will focus on how Spanish and indigenous peoples of the New World used the Virgin to negotiate their relationship and respective identities, as the Christians, Muslims, and Jews of medieval Castile did centuries before on the other side of the Atlantic. La Conquistadora’s medieval past helps explain why Mary remains a focus of volatile identity politics in modern New Mexico.
Wednesday, April 2, 5:15 p.m.
Stanley M. Hordes, “The Sephardic Legacy in New Mexico: A History of the Crypto-Jews”
Hordes’s lecture considers the history of the crypto-Jews of New Mexico from their origins in forced conversions of Spain in the 14th and 15th centuries, to the recent past. During his tenure as New Mexico State Historian (1981-1985), Hordes encountered people within the Hispanic community whose practices suggested vestigial Jewish customs, such as lighting candles on Friday night in observance of the Jewish Sabbath and following Jewish dietary laws. Further investigation, and conversations with colleagues in the fields of sociology and anthropology, revealed this phenomenon could be found in communities throughout the state. This led to establishing a project, sponsored by UNM’s Latin American Institute, to research the history of New Mexican crypto-Jews.
Hordes discusses origins of conversos from their Jewish beginnings in Spain and Portugal, through the forced conversions of the 14th and 15th centuries, to their migration to the New World in the 16th and 17th centuries. He describes demographic, occupational, social and religious life of crypto-Jews in New Spain, as well as sporadic campaigns of the Holy Office of the Inquisition against this community in the late 16th and mid-17th centuries.
He touches on early colonization efforts northward from central Mexico into New Mexico, and the possible cause and effect between persecution of crypto-Jews and converso participation in establishing the new colony. He also treats evolution of the crypto-Jewish community in New Mexico through the succeeding three centuries, describing customs and consciousness that has survived. His presentation includes slides showing the possible manifestation of this consciousness on cemetery headstones and other aspects of material culture.
Wednesday, April 2, 7:15 p.m.
Sylvia Rodriguez, “The Matachines Dance: Spiritual Conquest and Ritual Memory”
The Matachines Dance belongs to a genre of conquest dance dramas performed throughout Latin America. Scholars believe Iberian antecedents of this form portray the spiritual conquest of a Moorish army by a Christian army. Rodriguez describes how Catholic missionaries to the New World projected the Christian-Moor struggle onto their encounter with indigenous American peoples, forcibly deploying ritual dance forms to Christianize Indians.
In the Upper Rio Grande Valley of New Mexico, the Matachines is the only ritual dance performed in both Indian Pueblos and Hispano communities. There, the dance involves two lines of masked dancers, a young girl in white and her crowned, older male partner, a bull, and two clowns. Accompanied by violin, guitar, and sometimes a drum, these characters enact a choreographic drama that symbolizes encounter, struggle and transformation. Illustrating her presentation with slides, Rodriguez discusses the Matachines dancers of Taos Pueblo, Picuris Pueblo, Alcalde, San Juan Pueblo, El Rancho, San Antonio and Tortugas.
Thursday, April 3, 5:15 p.m.
Concert of Music by the UNM Early Music Ensemble, led by Colleen Sheinberg
Thursday, April 3, 7:15 p.m.
Thomas E. Chávez, “Quixotic New Mexico: A Spanish Heritage in Modern New Mexico”
The title of Chávez’s lecture plays off two novels, Cervantes’s Don Quixote and Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur’s Court. The former was the first modern novel and poked fun at much of what was medieval in Spain, while the latter took a modern person back in time. Chávez reverses this by bringing yesteryear to the present. There are numerous examples of customs, traditions, foods, words and music that have survived from Spain to New Mexico. The presentation highlights and analyzes the most interesting of these and also draws the lecture series to a narrative close by presenting an understandable “big picture” of the overall theme.
Posted by scarr at March 14, 2008 11:39 AM