The Best of the American West

Latino, Native, and Cowboy Cultural Legacies

I rarely write about myself — I write about the subjects that fascinate me — but the pair of short pieces I’m posting below call out for a personal introduction. So indulge me briefly, please, as I write about my own life experience.

I’ve lived three-fourths of my life in northern New Mexico. This is home. I’m a New Mexican.

I’ve traveled to 43 other states and lived in 12 other states and D.C., but I’ve always returned home to live in Albuquerque. I’m a creature of the Rocky Mountain West and especially of northern New Mexico — the most strongly tricultural society in the United States.

I spent half my elementary school years at a school where 80 percent of the students were Navajos. I spent an equal number of years at schools where 80 percent of the students were Latino. I remember Santa Fe as a child in the 1970s and youth in the early 1980s — before the influx of Californians — with its generations of Spaniards reaching back into the early 1500s. And I’ve spent two-thirds of my life here in Albuquerque, with our balanced (roughly 42%-42%) White-Latino population and 8% Native American population.

At the same time, I grew up around horses, went riding regularly with my parents and sisters for 12 years, for a couple years went up a couple miles each evening with Dad to feed our horses, attended rodeos, and participated in 4-H. Many of my friends were cowboys. My brother-in-law and nephew were cowboys. For several years our family owned an 80-acre ranch in the Pecos Wilderness and spent many weekend and summer days there. So I had a little of the cowboy in me as a child and youth.

I made my living in politics, and while almost all my paychecks were coming from Washington, I interacted as a bipartisan player with all the major characters here in my state, including Senators Pete Domenici, Harrison “Jack” Schmitt, Jeff Bingaman, and Martin Heinrich, Congressman Manuel Lujan, and seven governors, including Bill Richardson and Gary Johnson. In the 2010s, my last paid public political and policy work was for our future Attorney General Hector Balderas and our future (current) Lieutenant Governor Howie Morales.

Across these same years, I kept up with the hi-tech dimension of my metro area, especially as it intersected with public policy, and I networked with leading-edge entrepreneurs and young techies of my generation. I did communications work for scientists and engineers at both Sandia National Labs and Los Alamos National Labs.

And I’ve studied the history. I’m familiar with much of the history of New Mexico back to the 1500s, and (to a lesser extent) much of the American West.

So, with this immersive experience in the life of New Mexico, you’d think that when I sat down to work on my novels it would have been easy for me to get at the essence of the cowboy cultural tradition and legacy and the essence of the Latino / Native cultural tradition and legacy. And to express both of these in words.

It was not.

First, there are so many things I’ve always taken for granted.

Second, the two overlap. One-third of the original cowboys of the American West were Latinos. Since the 1800s, Anglos, Latinos, and Natives have forged a common culture here in northern New Mexico. Nationwide, almost all the polls I’ve seen across recent decades have shown few differences between how White men and Latino men in the U.S. think about things.

Third, the Spanish and Portuguese influence in the Americas is profound. You can’t delineate someone or something as Latino if influence from one or both of these two nations is lacking. But the people of Spain and Portugal actually Latinos per se? (I finally concluded that they must be.)

Fourth, there are 500 Native tribes in the Americas. Each is unique. And within each tribe and pueblo, each person decides how to balance their tribal identity with Spanish (or Portuguese) influences and with other Western (White) influences. If I’ve learned anything, it’s that each Native American has to be approached as a unique individual.

And fifth, the Latino and Native cultures are so intertwined as to become, at points, indistinguishable.

So defining what it is to be Latino (or mestizo) is a lot slipperier than I ever imagined.

My novels revolve around a family that was started when two college students meet in Boulder, date, and marry during and after the First World War: a Welsh-American from Wyoming, Riis Evans and his Latina / mestiza girlfriend-turned-wife with roots in northern New Mexico, Carmen del Castille Calderon. (His sister Gwen Evans and her brother Francis Calderon are also major characters in the first novel.)

When Carmen dies and later Riis dies near the end of the third novel, each leaves a note to be read at her / his funeral. And each expresses in a few paragraphs her / his sense of what ought to be the enduring legacy of her / his culture.

I think these express that cultural essence I was searching for. And taken together, I think they get to the essence not only of northern New Mexico but to some extent the legacy of the American West — and maybe even help us move toward the heart of the Americas.

Denver

September 21, 1974

Riis reads Carmen’s letter at her funeral:

Dear friends and kinfolk,

In my four decades as a therapist and my seven and a half decades of life, I picked up a little wisdom I’d like to share with you:

Most of what each of us becomes as a human being is either universal or personal.  But our cultures do matter.  Very much so.

Yes, our cultural identity is partially given to us, but it is primarily forged by each of us.  Out of true stories and imagined stories, out of history and myth, out of memory – out of collective and community and family memory.

As we know, our family has long relied on the best cultural works we could find.  In Shakespeare and Austen and Eliot.  In Michelangelo and Mozart.  In my own European roots, in Spain – in the works of Miguel de Cervantes and Pedro Calderon de Baca.  And even in my own generation – in Louis Armstrong and Sinclair Lewis and Georgia O’Keefe and, yes, Riis’s friend who passed last year, J.R.R. Tolkien.

And we are people of the American West.  The American Frontier and the West have always been invested with hopes and dreams, and so have you.  You are descendants of cowboy-gentlemen and cowgirl-ladies.  Much is expected of you and of your conduct.

So it’s always been my hope that each of you – whether you entered our family through natural birth or adoption or marriage – would draw from all this ancestral and cultural excellence.  And draw it from one place more.

Through me, some of your spirituality, some of your thought, some of your history, and some of your deepest, richest symbols and myths come to you not just from Spain but from the pueblos of the Rio Grande and, yes, from the Aztecs.  Each of you is a child of Europe and a child of the Americas.  Each of you is not just a Spaniard in thought and soul; you are a mestizo or a mestiza: both a Spaniard and a Native American.

Forget what the world thinks.  If they don’t think you’re equal, mijo, mija, just step forward and prove that you are.  Never leave your equality in doubt.  Prove it.

About this part of your cultural identity I could say much.  Let me just say this:

One of your homes is a spiritual birthplace and homeland that lies deep in our tribal memory.  Aztlan.

You are a citizen of Aztlan.  Proclaim this part of your cultural identity.

You are a mestizo or a mestiza, and thus you are an inocente:  You know that there is suffering but you choose to smile more than you frown.  You see the goodness in others, you see the goodness in your soul reflected in other souls, and their goodness reflected in yours, inside, deep in their soul and deep in your soul.

We are talking about something that is both universal and personal.  However, I have believed that those of us who inhabit Aztlan have a special gift for it.

And so if you have the ganas – if you have the desire – then I ask you to do just one thing each and every day to proclaim your Native heritage and legacy.  And that thing is this:  Communicate in ways that you bring out the secret light that is hidden in each person’s soul.

Denver

June 7, 1976

Their son Ren reads Riis’s letter at his funeral:

Dear neighbors and friends and family,

We are people of the American West.  My dad Rhys taught me that the true American cowboy and cowgirl – the true American Westerner – ranked as good as any gentleman or lady at any time and in any place.  This is something I urge you remember in this modern decade of the 1970s, and for the rest of your lives.  Remember the Old West, which was still in its heyday in my childhood and which my parents remembered even more vividly.

The true American West was defined by pioneers with invincible spirits – spirits tempered on this frontier to a cutting edge.  They lived by honor and by the bond of a handshake.  They had endless hardships and difficulties to overcome but they were hardy and resourceful and ingenious.

The cowboys and other fine Westerners believed in good versus evil and preferred the good.  They brought a happy courage to living and to upholding the good when it was truly at stake.  They lived by the pride of their labor and never, ever wanted to be the weak link in a strong chain.  They exercised self-control, self-mastery, foresight, and imagination because they knew that all four are essential to survival and success.

They were free-hearted and buoyant and came at the rush of life with relish and a joyful saddle song.  And when they lost a fight they bounced back up with a grin, ready for more.

These true cowboys, unshaven, with battered hats and dusty clothes, got up each day knowing it was a new day and with the spirit to confront its adventures.  They were utterly at ease on this planet as a good place to spend a lifetime.  And they’d given happiness a long head start.

The cowboys and cowgirls who sang and joked around their chuck wagons and campfires were good men and women – and they were true.  Counting on their fellows, with their open-handed generosity and their steadfast loyalty, they were all help and laughter.  And together they achieved the most astonishing and impossible things in the most pleasant way.