Fe y tragedias: Faith and Tragedies in Hispanic Villages of New Mexico

By Nasario García

The stories of tragedy and sadness shared by old-timers (viejitos) in Fe y tragedias: Faith and Tragedy in Hispanic Villages of New Mexico are as diverse as the voices behind them. Each bilingual (Spanish and English) account personifies faith, fortitude, compassion, and buoyancy. Without these human attributes, people beset with tragedy would have succumbed to tragedy itself.The high point of interest in this book is not to promote or engage in doom and gloom. Rather, it is to acquaint and educate readers on how humble but strong and devout folks living in isolation—in most cases far removed geographically from an urban environment—coped with tragedy and despair. The net psychological effect of murder, drowning, the Rangers’ indiscriminate and callous slaughtering of poor people’s cattle, bewitchment, or the quirks of nature (e.g., baby born with frog features) on the human psyche was profound but not daunting. Tom Chávez’s eloquent words in his Preface summed up best the old-timers’ poignant past when he said, “These are real people talking about real lives. They are witnesses to their own history.”If the victims of misfortune became heroes in their community, then the aggrieved surely could be categorized as tragic heroes. A more praiseworthy tribute could not be accorded these courageous and remarkable men and women who believed in redemption.For the past 30-plus years Nasario García has devoted his life to the preservation of Hispanic language, culture and folklore of New Mexico. He has authored/co-authored 21 books. Among them are—Old Las Vegas: Hispanic Memories from the New Mexico Meadowlands, winner of the Southwest Book Award; and Brujerías: Stories of Witchcraft and the Supernatural in the American Southwest and Beyond, a finalist in the New Mexico Book Awards.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Feb 1, 2010
• ISBN: 9781936744756

Nasario García

Folklorist and native New Mexican Nasario García has published numerous books about Hispanic folklore and the oral history of northern New Mexico, including Hoe, Heaven, and Hell: My Boyhood in Rural New Mexico (UNM Press) and Grandpa Lolo’s Navajo Saddle Blanket: La tilma de Abuelito Lolo (UNM Press). He lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

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Copyright © 2010, 2014 Nasario García

Published by Rio Grande Books

925 Salamanca NW

Los Ranchos, NM 87107-5647

505-344-9382

www.nmsantos.com

Printed in the United States of America

Book Design: Paul Rhetts

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means without permission in writing from the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

García, Nasario.

Fe y tragedias : faith and tragedies in hispanic villages of New Mexico / Collected and Translated by Nasario García.

p. cm.

ISBN 978-1-890689-56-8 (pbk. : alk. paper)

ISBN 978-1-936744-75-6 (ebook formats)

1. Older Hispanic Americans--New Mexico--Interviews. 2. Older Hispanic Americans--New Mexico--History. 3. Older Hispanic Americans--New Mexico--Social conditions. I. Title.

E184.S75G368 2010

978.9’00468073--dc22

2010004582

IN MEMORIUM

For

Myra Ellen Jenkins.

Friend

and

avid supporter

of my oral history work.

En las güenas y las malas siempre estaba Dios con nosotros.

Through good and bad times God was always with us.

Juan José Griego

Río Puerco Valley

Contents

IN MEMORIUM

Preface

Introduction

Jesusita Aragón

Perfilia Córdova

Samuel Córdova

Bencés Gabaldón

Nasario P. García

Eremita García-Griego de Lucero

Carmelita Gómez

Emelinda Gonzales

Reynaldo Gonzales

Andrés Griego

Edumenio Ed Lovato

Salomón Sal Lovato

Benjamín Benny Lucero

Guadalupe Luján

José Nataleo Montoya

Rudy Montoya

Emilia Padilla-García

Manuel Pérez

Alberto Salas

Luciano Sánchez

Nobertita Tafoya y Padilla

Teresina Ulibarrí

Eduardo Valdez

Epilogue

Glossary

Informants—Personal Data

About The Author

Preface

Deep human emotion is often missed in the telling of history with its time-honored and worn plethora of dates and names or places and events. History, if nothing else, is the story of human beings, people who laughed and cried, loved and hated just like we do. Throughout history certain human basics existed, like food and water for subsistence.

And cultures shaped by place, environment and events developed around different peoples. Culture took the basics beyond animal instinct for survival to human desire for the intangible, which can be but is not necessarily different from culture to culture. So diets, language, faith, social organizations, etc., developed in different ways in different places.

The feelings, the mental outlook of what people thought, their true motives, the deep unbinding human recognition of death and then how to recognize or ignore the reality of it and how that reflects on life, and many other unspoken feelings–all this, some would say is left to the novelist, poet, or, maybe, psychoanalyst but not to the historian. Histories have given accounts of various cultures, especially those narratives of the differences that bring them into conflict. Yet we all know that a history of people, out of necessity, must involve their feelings.

Nasario García, who is a poet and a linguist but also a historian, who through the time consuming work of collecting and transcribing the stories of people who lived in desperate areas of New Mexico has fulfilled a critical gap in the telling of yesteryear’s stories. He harvests history from people who, in the main, told their stories in the language of their culture, not in the primary language of their country. And the stories abound in human interest, not dates and names. These are real people talking about real lives. They are witnesses to their own history.

Yet, Nasario García, who has published a multitude of volumes with these oral histories, has in this volume, taken up a challenge that few scholars would accept. He has compiled a book about faith and tragedy. All of us have faith of some form and, as the saying goes faith cannot be questioned. It is what it is and while it transcends through humankind it remains as individual as human personalities.

So, how to describe faith? One way is not to try but to let it naturally come from the individual. The person can relate a story and, in a moment, faith becomes a part of the telling. It is an innocent but truthful admission. It cannot be described so much as heard, seen, or even, felt.

Tragedy is even a more difficult subject, for anyone who suffered such feeling will say that the emotions of tragedy cannot be explained; words alone cannot convey the feeling. Yet it happens and most people will suffer tragedy sometime in their lifetime.

How can Nasario García put together a book about these two very personal yet universal concepts; the mental pegs of human thought processes that either cannot be questioned or described? More appropriately, how does he succeed in solving this puzzle? The answer is simple; he lets the people speak for themselves. And, while even their own words may miss the mark they make the reader reach beyond the comfort zone of plots and names to feel their humanity. Because of Nasario’s meticulous care for his subjects and subject matter the reader is left to understand the complexity of faith and tragedy the only way that they can—through their own individual capacity for empathy.

Although this may appear to be a simple book, it is not, for Nasario García has put forth some unheard voices that will speak to the readers’ own humanity. Only then do we understand the faith as well as tragedy of others. Only then do we begin to realize that history is something much more profound than a litany of events. Once again, Nasario García has used the voices of the not-too-distant past to challenge the present. Through his work, and in this volume, Nasario García has become the conduit for a culture and time; a conduit that brings to us invaluable lessons.

Thomas E. Chávez

May 2009

Albuquerque, New Mexico

Introduction

During the past thirty-plus years a number of viejitos (old-timers) from various parts of northern New Mexico have shared stories with me on a variety of misfortunes. In fact, a chapter titled Their Tragedies was included in my first book on oral history, Recuerdos de los viejitos:Tales of the Río Puerco (University of New Mexico Press, 1987), no longer in print. Those tragedies, which dealt with topics like accidental drownings, influenza, murder, and feuds between Hispanos and Indians, brought to light many years later the idea of publishing a work on a subject hitherto not widely known to the general public except for snippets found in history books and ballads. Hence, Fe y tragedias: Faith and Tragedies in Hispanic Villages of New Mexico was born.

In putting together the present work, the old-timers’ voices came alive with sufficient stories on incidents that occurred in Hispanic villages during the first half of the twentieth century to justify an opus on tragedies and faith. The intent is not to engage the reader in the doom and gloom aspects of country life. On the contrary, the overriding purpose is to acquaint and educate readers on how ordinary and humble folks living in isolation, in most cases far removed geographically from urban life, dealt and coped with tragedy and despair with faith at their lap. The net psychological effect on the human psyche, as one can imagine, was profound.

Tragedy, in its broadest and fundamental sense according to Webster’s New World Dictionary, 2nd College Edition, is a very sad or tragic event that evokes grief or sorrow. Throughout the ages tragedy has been part of the history of mankind. Today reports of tragic events are aired daily on television and printed on the pages of newspapers, magazines, and books in civilized nations like ours. The perverse nature of this phenomenon is vividly embedded in our national consciousness.

At home history teaches us that New Mexico throughout the centuries has not been immune from tragedy. Conflict between the Spanish conquistadores and indigenous groups during the colonial period or squabbles involving newcomers—the Americans—from the States following the opening of the Santa Fe Trail in 1821 attest to sad episodes in our history. The exile of the Diné people to Bosque Redondo in 1863 under the leadership of U. S. Army Brigadier General James H. Carleton is another poignant reminder of tragedy in our state. The Lincoln County War, the Tierra Amarilla courthouse raid of 1967, or the violence personalities like William Bonny (alias Billy the Kid), Élfego Baca, Jesse James, and Butch Cassidy provoked is testimony to the Wild West syndrome.

When someone is affected directly, not vicariously as may be the case in reading about historical incidents or figures, tragedy pacts its own punch and assumes its own meaning, nuances, and proportions. A host of emotions, including pain and anxiety, comes into play. But any tragedy, irrespective of its breadth and scope, especially illnesses, is deemed by most devout Hispanic old-timers to come about because of God’s will (el bien de Dios). Some may indeed question why misfortune befell them, their family members, or their friends, but they are careful not to unduly criticize God’s judgment. To do so would be blasphemous and outside the boundaries of human reasoning and soul searching.

The old folks believed without equivocation that there was no better substitute or anointment to soothe the soul and comfort the heart in the midst of or following a crisis than to rely on their faith. Their unwavering trust and reliance in God was—and to a large extent still is—paramount. These precepts were lodged in the person’s religious free will, not forced upon him or her, but embraced as an extension of the virtues espoused and practiced by their parents and grandparents. Faith and tragedy are as dissimilar as oil and water; yet on the other hand, they are mutually as compatible as hand in glove. Tragedy, after all, yields to faith and faith in turn enables victims of tragedies to survive and go on with their lives.

A few stories in the ensuing collection express an overt sense of faith; other times the unspoken word may be just as telling. Eremita García-Griego de Lucero in Siempre estaba Dios con nosotros (God’s Was Always with Us) is one of the rare cases in which God is acknowledged openly. An expression of faith and hope in God through the eyes and presence of the mother is seen in Samuel Córdova’s story There’s Nothing like a Mother’s Blessing. The mother’s blessing before he left home destined for places unknown in search of work to earn money to help his family put food on the table was, according to him, like hearing God’s voice."

The relationship between God and the worshiper among Hispanics has always been very personal. Nothing demonstrates this closeness and dual world of piety forged into one entity than the manner in which they (we) address God in Spanish using the familiar form of Tú, for You. Referring to God by employing the formal use of Usted (You) would be unthinkable; it would also violate the intimate relationship between God and his devotees. Many worshippers, including my own parents, referred to God as Mi Tatita Dios. By employing the diminutive of Tata (Father) it both denoted and reemphasized intimacy and trust with the Father Almighty (Mi Tatita Dios).

No image of closeness fits the foregoing frame better than my maternal grandmother who was physically disabled and wheelchair bound for a great portion of her eighty-four years on this earth due to a freak dancing accident. She was a very devout person who later in life rarely went to church, and it was not because she scuffed at institutionalized religion. Self-conscious on the one hand because of her disability, and, at the same time, not wanting to be a public spectacle or an inconvenience, she prayed to God and to the Holy Child of Atocha in the privacy of her home. She was wholly comfortable with this arrangement.

Listen, my dear son (Mira, hijito) she once said to me. To pray and be a good person you don’t have to go to church and beat your chest every Sunday. If you’re sincere in your devoutness, God will come to your home. True to her word even the local priest would visit her at home once a month toward the end of her life to hear confession. This act of blessing was ample proof that my Grandma’s religio laici, a lay person’s religious conviction, was genuine and down to earth. She whispered her prayers in private, and God listened.

As I reflected on my grandmother’s state of mind and her disability, and the stoic manner in which she accepted her condition, I could not help but think, too, of my maternal great-grandmother (I called her Mamá Juanita) who was blind. Blindness is something I took for granted as a small, innocent boy because of the way that she maneuvered around my grandmother’s house. One of the few times she seemed to ask for help was in lighting her cigarettes (she sported yellow fingers from being a chain smoker), fearful of burning herself, which she did from time to time. I would strike a kitchen match under her wooden chair and light up her cigarettes. Otherwise, she was pretty self-reliant, even when she visited the outhouse.

I was awestruck with her situation as well as the stories I sometimes overhead or was told in my family regarding tragedies in my community and elsewhere in the Río Puerco Valley where I spent my formative years. The drama some of them packed with death and bereavement was heartrending, but to grasp the magnitude of the emotional shock heaped on the victims’ families at times was beyond my comprehension. After all, I was just a kid.

The first story (historia) I ever heard of tragedy came from my father. I was five or six years old. It left me numb and lost in thought. Juan Valdez’s vicious death in Cabezón, historically the most famous of the Río Puerco Valley villages southeast of Chaco Canyon, struck me as something cruel and surreal. Either because of jealousy involving a woman or political intrigue, Juan Valdez, a widower, was brutally murdered by having his head sliced with an axe in May 1908. He left behind three children: two small kids, a boy and a girl named Jacobo and Soraida, and a mentally disabled teenage son, Avelino (accounts differ on the number of children and their gender). One hundred years later a few people who are still alive remember the story with angst and a heavy heart.

The longer I lived on our family ranch not far from my placita of Guadalupe that hugged the Río Puerco some five miles south of Cabezón where Juan Valdez was murdered, the more I heard of tragedies in the region. Some tales like the Juan Valdez episode were revived from the past; others had a more contemporary ring to them.

Among more recent tragedies—and more than enough to fill a short book—is the heartbreaking story about a man from