More on Peones in New Mexico

Just reading the book titled "Canones, Values, Crisis, and Survival in a Northern New Mexico Village" written by Paul Kutsche and John R. Van Ness and published by the University of New Mexico Press in Albuquerque in 1981. So far I have read about 1/2 of the book and have found only one (1) thing I disagree with, and then only slightly. That in itself is amazing as I am a harsh critic of authors who pretend to know what they are writing about when writing about New Mexico and/or New Mexicans. This book is an excellent resource for the way life was back in the 1960's in Northern New Mexico villages for New Mexican Hispanos. I recommend it to anyone who has an interest.

We bought the book at the Angel Fire, New Mexico Library last week, it has been on the shelf there since 1981 until July of 2014 and has never been checked out, not once. Not a single time. That in itself speaks volumes.

Anyway, the authors mention that there is not nor probably ever were any stereotypical peones in Canones. Here I quote "There certainly is not and probably never has been a patron in Canones. There are, however, many patrones and many peones. A man who works for another man is his peon, and the employer is the patron." This is the way it really was for the great majority, regardless of what has been written or who has written it. The term peon was a proud term, both to the worker and to the one who hired him. Sometimes a man was a patron and sometimes a peon.

Check out previous post on this weblog on the subject at hand here.