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In This Issue: Books
Welcome to the Southwest Bookshelf, New Mexico Magazine's monthly column of book reviews serving as an indispensable guide to the latest poetry, fiction and non-fiction titles from New Mexico and the greater Southwest. Amber Hartley and Charles Bennett alternate in writing the column, anchored by a different guest review each month. Following are the reviews that appeared in the current 2008 issue of New Mexico Magazine.
Reviews by Charles Bennett
Hispano Culture
PENITENTE RENAISSANCE: Manifesting Hope
By Ruben E. Archuleta
El Jefe Publishing Co., www.eljeferuben.com, 115 pages, paper, $34.95
To outsiders, one of the most mysterious and intriguing aspects of Southwestern Hispano culture is the Roman Catholic lay organization known as Los Penitentes. This book provides a rare glimpse into the secret society, which is more than 200 years old. Known by various names, the Hermanidad (Brotherhood) is thought to have come to the Southwest from Mexico in the late 1700s and early 1800s, spurred by a lack of Catholic priests serving the isolated, rural communities of northern New Mexico and southern Colorado; today, the confraternity is devoted to performing year-round acts of charity. Penitente Renaissance: Manifesting Hope documents the contemporary activities of the Penitentes, and discusses such aspects of the Brotherhood as art and architecture, material culture, processions, hymns, and prayers.
The book’s 152 photos, mostly in color, document the Penitentes of New Mexico and south-central Colorado. The chapter on Penitente moradas (meeting or chapter houses) is especially interesting. We are informed that three different floor plans are used for New Mexico moradas, though only one plan is used in Colorado. Color photos depict moradas in Arroyo Seco and Ensenada, New Mexico, and there are 37 photos of southern Colorado moradas. Other chapters discuss the activities and legacies of the Penitentes, Holy Week activities, Spanish Penitente terms, and Penitente artifacts, all with accompanying photos. Penitente Renaissance presents a good overview of the Penitente tradition, with a decidedly Colorado emphasis. Author Ruben E. Archuleta, himself a Penitente, is a former police chief of Pueblo, Colorado.
Biography
MATILDA COXE STEVENSON: Pioneering Anthropologist
By Darlis A. Miller, Foreword by Louis A. Hieb
University of Oklahoma Press, www.oupress.com, 304 pages, cloth, $29.95
Matilda “Tilly” Coxe Stevenson (1849–1915) was the first woman anthropologist to work in the Southwest, and is still notable today for gaining privileged access to the practices of Zuni Pueblo’s women and children. This first biography of Stevenson, written by Darlis A. Miller, correctly positions her in the pantheon of field ethnologists. She is acknowledged for having helped define the contours of anthropological research at the turn of the twentieth century, and for her accomplishments as a field ethnologist at Zuni Pueblo, where she worked from 1879 to 1906.
In 1904, the Bureau of American Ethnology of the Smithsonian Institution, for whom Stevenson worked for 25 years, published her 600-page ethnography The Zuni Indians: Their Mythology, Esoteric Fraternities, and Ceremonies, which to this day remains, says Miller, “the most complete account of the Zuni people.” During her life Stevenson published 15 professional reports on aspects of Zuni, Zia, and Tewa Puebloan life, all using participant observation as the primary method of obtaining information about Indian societies, and all making important contributions to anthropology.
This biography is a good read, proceeding chronologically through Stevenson’s life and detailing not only her professional activities but her personal life as well, and providing a good look at what life was like for a professional woman at the turn of the last century. For example, on being denied membership in the Anthropological Society of Washington because she was a woman, Stevenson organized the Women’s Anthropological Society of America. One of her manuscripts, on the Tewa Indians of New Mexico—comprising 973 pages, 243 prints, and 277 negatives—was apparently lost after her death, but may resurface one day in a federal archive. When it does, more important ethnographic information about the Tewas from the turn of the last century will come to light.
Military History
THE GENERAL AND THE JAGUAR: Pershing’s Hunt for Pancho Villa A True Story of Revolution and Revenge
By Eileen Welsome
University of Nebraska Press, www.nebraskaprpress.unl.edu, 406 pages, paper, $21.95
On March 9, 1916, Mexican revolutionary Francisco “Pancho” Villa led 500 troops in a pre-dawn raid on the tiny border town of Columbus, New Mexico. Ninety-two years later, the raid remains a controversial event in American history. In a few hours’ time, Villa and his men killed 18 civilians and soldiers and burned several buildings; all told, there were more than 100 casualties. But to this day, Villa’s reasons for the raid remain unclear.
Author Eileen Welsome is best known for winning the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting for her “The Plutonium Experiment,” published in the Albuquerque Tribune. Her The General and the Jaguar is a well-paced narrative account of the raid, the events leading up to it, and its aftermath a week later—when an expeditionary force of 4,800 U.S. troops, under General John Pershing, entered Mexico with orders to drive the Villistas from the border and capture Villa himself. A year later, the force had grown to 10,000 but had failed to catch Villa, secure the border, or increase U.S. influence in Mexico. The skillful manner in which Welsome chronicles these events should enthrall anyone interested in this period.
Native American History
MEDIATING KNOWLEDGES: Origins of a Zuni Tribal Museum
By Gwyneira Isaac
University of Arizona Press, www.uapress.arizona.edu, 272 pages, cloth, $50.00
One of New Mexico’s unique museums is the A:shiwi A:wan Museum and Heritage Center, the tribal museum and cultural center for Zuni Pueblo, south of Gallup. Zuni was the site of the first contact between Europeans and indigenous cultures in what is today the United States; further, Zuni Pueblo is known as one of most traditional Native American villages in the Southwest, to the extent of closing itself off from outsiders at critical times in their religious cycles, as well as being among the first tribal groups requesting repatriation of cultural artifacts.
The idea of establishing a museum at Zuni was first introduced in 1965. Younger tribal members were moving off the reservation, and elders realized they could no longer exclusively rely on the oral tradition to pass on cultural knowledge to future generations. According to author Dr. Gwyneira Isaac, although many tribal museums across the country were established for this reason, the Zunis were not immediately convinced that a museum was the answer. Her description of the entire process of the museum’s development is a unique story of self-empowerment, relationships, and reconciliation of Native and non-Native American values.
Regional History
LOVINGTON: Survivor on the High Plains
By Gil Hinshaw
Published by the Lea County Museum, leacomuseum@leaco.net, 176 pages, cloth, $30.00
Lovington, a New Mexico city of some 9,700 souls roughly 20 miles west of the Texas state line on U.S. 82, celebrates its centennial this year. In 1908, the town was established as a ranching and agriculture mercantile center by Robert Florence “Fiddle Case” Love, who homesteaded in the area in 1903. Now, in commemoration, the Lea County Museum—among the state’s most sophisticated local heritage museums —has published Gil Hinshaw’s well-crafted narrative of the community’s history. Among the book’s best anecdotes are of: The county-seatship controversy of 1936: Over the years, several New Mexico towns have battled each other for the distinction of county seat, but the rivalry between Lovington and Hobbs is one of the most notorious. In 1936, a group from Hobbs—the newer, larger, oil boomtown 20 miles south—dismantled the entire Lea County Courthouse. (Fortunately, all records had been removed beforehand.) But the ranching and farm faction of Lovington played a trump card. New Mexico law prohibited relocating a courthouse if the two communities in question were less than 20 miles apart. So the town of Lovington quickly annexed land, extending the city limit five miles south. As a result, Lovington was then 19 miles and 4,780 feet from Hobbs—and their county seatship was saved.
The discovery of the Denton Pool: Extensive oil-drilling operations began in the Lovington area in 1948, when a 12,000-foot well struck what became known as the Denton Pool, one of the richest oil-bearing discoveries in the entire Southwest. By 1950, 96 wells were pumping 21,000 barrels a day from the Denton Pool, and Lovington was booming, with 2,166 people working in the oil industry.
The future of Lovington: These days, a major project affecting Lovington and Lea County is the Louisiana Energy Service’s construction of a uranium-enrichment plant near Eunice, 42 miles south. The plant is expected to be completed in 2012 and to employ 2,000.
A 26-page supplement includes basic information about notable people from Lovington, including Georgia Lusk (1893–1971), the first New Mexican woman to serve in Congress (1946), and who, with Representative Harold Runnels (1924–1980), was one of two national lawmakers hailing from Lovington.
The museum occupies the former Commercial Hotel, built in 1918 and for many years the showpiece of downtown Lovington. (See the interview with museum director Jim Harris on page 74.) The museum, whose grounds contain a number of other historic buildings, is a vibrant force in Lea County.
Twentieth Century History
THEY CHANGED THE WORLD: People of the Manhattan Project
By aj Melnick
Sunstone Press, www.sunstonepress.com, 136 pages, paper, $22.95
This unusual volume is a kind of scrapbook dedicated to the everyday people who called The Hill home in the days when the Manhattan Project was top secret, the town of Los Alamos didn’t yet exist, and all its residents had the same government-issued address: P.O. Box 1663, Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Photographer and writer aj Melnick has interviewed and taken portraits of the housekeepers and clerks, physicists and engineers who worked in what was then little more than an army camp set up on the desolate Pajarito Plateau. Their mission was simple but daunting: build an atomic bomb before the Germans did.
Sixty years after the completion of the project and the end of WWII, Melnick tracked down 61 of the people who were involved, and frames their stories with photos taken then and now. They Changed the World helps confirm what a special time it was for Melnick’s subjects to work at the Manhattan Project from 1943 to 1945, and establishes a historical context for the intellectual community that is today’s Los Alamos.
