It is no secret that the more recent history of Santa Fe and northern New Mexico is a history of conquest.
The Spanish conquistadors arrived with settlers to establish a subsistence-farming, communal and homogeneous society. Then the Americans arrived, bringing military bivouacs and a mercantile culture. In the late 19th century and throughout the 20th century, art colonists, more merchants, tourists, developers and newcomer residents arrived in wave after wave. What has been the impact of those waves? What has been lost and what has been gained?
Four evenings of conversation at El Museo Cultural will address those issues. There are no pat answers to the questions, organizer Robert Sinn said.
"The important thing is that we need to start asking the questions," Sinn said. "The answers, whatever they are, would depend upon the individual's viewpoint, anyway."
El Museo, a nonprofit, grass-roots local meeting, exhibition and performance site, is the obvious place for this experiment in cross-cultural communication to occur, Sinn said. With El Museo's board President Tom Romero and its executive director Maria Martinez, he is the facilitator for the Tuesday evening events.
The idea for the conversations grew out of previous events at El Museo that sparked discussion around loss-and-gain issues, Sinn said. He noted a meeting he helped coordinate for the anniversary of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo that evolved into a powerful discussion of land-grant and related topics among community members who had come to the event.
"It just seemed to me that Santa Fe is grown-up enough to talk about the issues openly and with respect for each other," Sinn said. The conversations will be in English and Spanish, with the facilitators willing to translate for people who are not bilingual.
The three facilitators come at the idea from different perspectives. Sinn, retired from a long career as a caseworker for the state Health and Human Services Departments, has a deep concern for old Hispanic families in Santa Fe and environs. He sees diminishing state and federal support for the cultural and familial ties that bound the families, even in poverty, and consequently a loss of coherence in the culture. As an example, Sinn cites the loss of programs allowing older Spanish women to keep foster children.
"There isn't less need, but the abuelitas are not supported in the system any more," Sinn said.
For Romero, the losses to the old Hispanic culture start much further back, with the arrival of the American troops in 1846.
"I identify with the common people, not the leaders," said the Santa Fe native. "My people were the subsistence farmers, the villagers, who woke up one day and were informed, by people speaking a language they did not understand, that they were now in another country, with different people in charge. It was sort of like what we've done in Iraq, only they're fighting back more than we did."
Overnight, Romero said, New Mexicans were faced with a government that had a different concept of land and how it should be measured. In some ways, he added, the Hispanic people in northern New Mexico have never really recovered. In other ways, they have assimilated. He said he hoped that people of Santa Fe would come to the Tuesday night conversations prepared to talk about those issues, although he said he was not promoting just a grievance-airing.
Martinez had a completely different viewpoint growing up in the rural reaches of mountainous northern New Mexico.
"We were out of another time," she said of herself and her family. "I've lived in Santa Fe 30 years. People ask me how it has changed since my childhood. I tell them, 'I have no idea. We never went to Santa Fe when I was a child.' Certainly it's changed since I've moved here. Those are changes we can talk about, too."
Martinez said if these conversations happen the way previous ones have, there would be little need of "talking points" or even leading questions.
"Sometimes I think the term 'facilitator' lends itself to a definition of 'semi-interpreter,' not really refereeing, but being sometimes a bit of a guide," she said. "In a sense, you just take people's hand to make them comfortable to talk about things.
"El Museo's decision to set up these evenings is like an invitation," Martinez added. "It's an invitation for us to go beyond whatever veneers we use in public, to drop the armors and talk, gently and decently. It will be a good thing, as long as we can be decent and civilly respectful of each other."
If You Go
WHAT: Cuatro Conversaciones en El Museo, conversations in English and Spanish about Santa Fe's past and future
WHEN: 7-9 p.m., Tuesday and April 15, 22 and 29
WHERE: El Museo Cultural de Santa Fe, 1615 Paseo de Peralta, in the Railyard
HOW MUCH: Free. For information, contact (505) 992-0591.
