La Vregunza De Ser Nuevo Mejicano

The shame that some New Mexican Hispanos live with because of being Hispanic. There seems to be no end to the variations of racial pretensions on the part of some New Mexicans. They cannot seem to get far enough away from just being who they are without trying to be something else. It is hard for me to be able to tell when, what era, this started in or if it has always been this way. My best guess is it started when the Americans arrived in 1846 and they saw the whole population of New Mexico as made up of three separate groups, the Spanish, the Mexican and the Indian.

The identity rush was on.

Not much time goes by when I do not see or hear another cockamamie utterance on what this or that New Mexican thinks he or she is. There seems to be no end to us wanting to be something other than what we are. This has been going on long enough that those who come in contact with us are sometimes afraid to broach the subject.

Quoted in his book "The Spanish Redemption: Heritage, Power, and Loss on New Mexico's Upper Rio Grande" published in 2002 by the University of California Press and written by Charles Montgomery he quotes:

In 1930 Reyes Nicanor Martinez  speaking of his sisters, Cleofas Martinez,  wedding to Venesclao Jaramillo remembered their marriage as an example of how families of Spanish stock conserved their traditions and kept their blood pure. "Weddings like theirs he wrote "served to preserve unimpaired the refinement and culture of these families, which still distinguishes them from the rest of the population of New Mexico".

Maria Cleofas Martinez de Jaramillo herself described her idyllic life and wedding in her own book titled "Romance of a Little Village Girl" published by the Naylor Company in San Antonio, Texas in 1956 and again the University of New Mexico Press in 2000.

But those books and that particular family aside... the effort by New Mexicans to be who they are not is beyond adequate documentation in one post on this weblog. Suffice it to say, there are many, many instances and many, many different groups who New Mexicans try to identify with other than who the odds favor that they really are.

I tell you that is is an embarrassing situation when forced to confront and discuss it. Not a good subject to bring up as the conversation forces some serious introspection on the one part and a complete denial on the other.

One comment on the weblog a while back probably put it best, we ought to self identify as New Mexicans and when challenged we could then explain the tangled web our ancestors wove.

The final word on this will not come for many, many generations. We, New Mexicans, seem to have more than our share of people who will go to no ends to deny being who we are. It just does not seem enough.