Borderlands

My girlfriend is housesitting this week near Whole Foods, so today I had my first experience of that controversial establishment. Now that I’ve seen it, I finally understand both why it’s so expensive and why people like it so much: the stuff all looks like it’s of really high quality. I only had coffee and a muffin, but they were both excellent. I still, of course, abhor the labor practices and such, and I won’t be going there often.

While we were there we noticed that most of the employees were wearing sombreros, which reminded us that it was Cinco de Mayo (and provided me with an excuse to gently chide my companion for getting an almond croissant). Cinco de Mayo occupies an ambiguous place in the cultural landscape of New Mexico. Despite a common misapprehension among Anglos, it is not Mexican Independence Day. That’s September 16, or Dieciséis de Septiembre, which is a major holiday in Mexico but is virtually unheard of in the US except among Mexican immigrants themselves. Cinco de Mayo instead commemorates the battle of Puebla in 1862, a major victory for Mexican forces over an invading French army sent to collect debts owed to France by Mexico. It is not even a federal holiday in Mexico, and it is celebrated primarily in the state of Puebla. Its observance in the US originated in California shortly after the battle, when the Hispanic population, only recently conquered by the US and still having substantial connections to Mexico, began to commemorate the victory as a sign of solidarity with the Mexican people. In recent decades it has become such a major celebration in California that it has spread to other parts of the country, especially those with large Mexican immigrant populations, and it has even begun to occupy a role for Mexican-Americans such as St. Patrick’s Day occupies for Irish-Americans and Columbus Day occupies for Italian-Americans, and like those earlier immigrant holidays it is steadily becoming an excuse to party and drink even for those with no connection to the ethnicity in question. Much tequila is consumed, and underpaid employees at fancy grocery stores wear sombreros.

New Mexico, of course, has a substantial and growing Mexican immigrant population these days, so it’s hardly a surprise that Cinco de Mayo is a big deal here. This is a somewhat recent development, however, and the majority of the Hispanic population in the state is descended from the original settlers who came here under Spanish rule, many of whom make great pains to distinguish themselves from Mexicans and identify more directly with Spain. In many circles the word “Chicano” is a slur. This is starting to change with increasing recent immigration, and among younger generations especially there is a growing sense of a Hispanic identity that includes close ties to Mexico. The increasing prominence of Cinco de Mayo plays a role in this process.

Nevertheless, the distinction between “Mexican” and “New Mexican” (or “Hispano”) in this state is still very much alive, and it is largely the result of the fact that New Mexico was conquered by the US in the 1840s and effectively cut off from Mexico in many ways for several decades after that, ironically including the time when the battle of Puebla actually happened. The same was true for California, of course, but the situation was different there in ways that I don’t know much about. There is no parallel to the development of Cinco de Mayo for New Mexico in this period, and the trend was very much toward less rather than more solidarity with Mexico. There is a lot of scholarly literature on this topic with which I am not very familiar, but certainly the encouragement of increasing distance from Mexico and identification with the US, exemplified most obviously in the movement for statehood, was identified with the elites of the territory, not just the Anglo immigrants who flowed in during the decades after the conquest but their close allies, the wealthy Hispanic families who had amassed great fortunes in agriculture, stockraising and trade under the late colonial and Mexican liberal economic regimes. New Mexico in the nineteenth century was a starkly inegalitarian society, marked by a contrast between a handful of wealthy families who owned vast tracts of land on which they grew crops and herded sheep in order to make huge profits shipping their surplus south to Chihuahua (and, beginning in the 1820s, north to St. Louis as well) and a much larger number of poor farmers and shepherds just barely scraping by on small plots of land. Both groups supplemented their earnings, whether large or small, with occasional expeditions to the edges of the territory to trade with the Indians surrounding on all sides, the most important of which were the Comanches to the east, the Navajos to the west and the Utes to the north. Many of these expeditions were peaceful and oriented toward trade, but there was also a significant amount of raiding, for the livestock that were increasingly important to both the Indian and Hispanic economies in this period but also, and perhaps more importantly for the development of a “borderland” society, for slaves.

Captives & Cousins: Slavery, Kinship, and Community in the Southwest Borderlands by James F. Brooks is a study of just what role this slave trade played in both Indian and Hispanic societies as they interacted and changed over the period of roughly 1700–1850.  His basic finding and contention is that while Indian and New Mexican societies were very different in many ways, they also had certain key similarities, most importantly a focus on male honor as expressed in both the capture of dependent women and children from elsewhere and the protection of such dependents, both captive and not, from capture by others.  This led to the development of a particular type of reciprocal slave-raiding and other cultural interactions more similar to that found in places such as Africa than the better-known chattel slavery of the American South in this same period.  Slaves in the Southwest existed in a hazy zone between the status of property and that of kin, and this odd ambiguity contributed greatly to the dynamic, mixed nature of borderland society.  Not that the lot of a slave was that great, of course, or even necessarily better than that of a slave in the South at this time, but there was a great deal of variety in the experiences and conditions of captives throughout the region.

I was reading this book over the course of a couple weeks before I left on my trip, and I finished it on my flight from Philadelphia to Frankfurt on the way to Budapest.  It was an interesting experience to read about the understudied and somewhat seamy history of my home state while traveling to a distant continent, but it gave me a lot to think about.  There is a lot more to this book than the slave trade, and it serves in some ways as a decent introduction to the social and economic history of the Southwest in the period it covers.  Highly recommended for anyone interested in this sort of thing.