This slim, attractive volume is packed full of vignettes celebrating the Upper Río Grande region that extends from northern New Mexico into southern Colorado, home to a thriving Indo-Hispano culture that has persisted in this majestic setting through many generations and over literally hundreds of years. The San Luis Valley of Colorado, a crossroads where Native Americans came to hunt, became the multicultural amalgam we know today beginning in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries with the arrival and settlement of Spanish-speaking farmers following the big river and its tributaries northwards out of what is today the state of New Mexico.
I can think of no better way for you to gain a feel for this remarkable culture than to pick up Hilos Culturales: Cultural Threads of the San Luis Valley and wend your way through its colorful and entertaining pages. In a scant 136 pages, this book conveys the vibrancy of the culture by foregrounding the traditional genres of artistic expression that became constitutive of village life and persist in the present as sources of community pride and cohesion. The foreword by Sam Bock, editor of The Colorado Magazine, places this book in the context of a larger educational project featuring the Colorado southern borderlands, and Charles Nicolas Saenz, professor at Adams State University, offers in his prologue a helpful summary of the region’s history. But the real meat in this coconut, or better, the pulp in this ripe aguacate, resides in the seventy-eight-page introduction by Enrique Lamadrid, professor emeritus at the University of New Mexico, and in the presentation of forty awardees of the Premio Hilos Culturales, selected, as we learn on the back cover, “as living treasures who embody and preserve the continued vitality of this cultural tapestry.”
The Hilos Culturales prize winners are presented via photographic portraits and short biographies compiled, affectionately I would say, by Patricia B. Martínez and Hermán A. Martínez. As Sam Bock has it in his foreword, they are “a testament to the power of song, of dance, of folklore and poetry to preserve a region’s vital and defining history and to inspire individuals and communities to embrace that history and pass it along” (7). Perusing this inventory of regional folk artists, I am struck by the formative influence of family, community, and place as the loci for this artistic endeavor. Yet, despite these local origins, many of the Hilos Culturales prize winners have circulated widely, gaining recognition throughout the states of New Mexico and Colorado and beyond, and, in several cases, performing at the Festival of American Folklife in Washington, D.C.
Lamadrid’s substantial introductory essay is titled “New Perspectives on the Traditional Literary Folklore, Music, and Dance of the Río Grande del Norte.” It paints a vivid portrait of family and community life as revealed through the traditional repertory of songs, sayings, dances, and other vernacular expressions. This essay pays homage to the main threads that weave the cultural fabric of the Upper Río Grande, its Indigenous, Hispanic, Mexican, and Chicano elements. For each thread of this rich heritage, Lamadrid instructs and delights the reader with well-chosen selections of oral poetry, in the original Spanish and in sharp English translations, with effective commentary and exegesis, and with a powerful companion set of photos and images, both historical and contemporary.
Lamadrid tells us that “Hispano families and clans came north to the San Luis Valley, seeking a new querencia, a beloved homeland, with pristine pastures for their flocks, rich bottomlands for their crops, and new opportunities for trade” (15). There they came into contact with Utes, Apaches, and Comanches, and these encounters, though not always friendly, brought these cultures into often intimate proximity, which has left prominent traces in the ritual and religious performances of the Upper Río Grande communities.
In addressing the Hispanidad theme, Lamadrid returns to the work of Aurelio Macedonio Espinosa, whom he calls the cultural cartographer of Colorado. We are treated to a survey and sampling of the main folkloric genres that Espinosa documented in the Upper Río Grande, running the gamut from the everyday to the ceremonial, from spoken forms to musical forms, and including dance and ritual performances as well. Espinosa, and his students Juan Bautista Rael, Juan Manuel Espinosa, and Ruben Cobos, assembled collectively one of the most complete documentary records that we have of an American folk culture. Lamadrid argues convincingly that the work of these pathbreaking folklorists is deserving of greater recognition and appreciation.
When Lamadrid takes up the Mexican element, our focus shifts from the Spanish romance to the Mexican corrido, and then, turning to what he calls the Neo-Mexicano and Chicano Renaissance, he highlights renowned political statements, such as the “Plan Espiritual de Aztlán,” promoted by Denver-based Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales, and events, such as Reies López Tijerina’s 1967 raid on the courthouse in Tierra Amarilla, New Mexico, to raise awareness of the land grant movement, much celebrated in corridos of the day. Lamadrid’s foray into the popular culture of the contemporary Upper Río Grande includes a reference to Sparx, composed of the four Sánchez sisters, who are not afraid to challenge the machismo in the culture even while respecting its artistic traditions.
Lamadrid finishes his inventory of Hispano expressive culture with a plea “that we not get sidetracked into fruitless and futile debates on ‘cultural authenticity’” and instead focus on values and habits that have survived and continue to nourish “a strong sense of ourselves and our new ethnic status in a dominant society” (88). He closes the essay by citing a small set of dichos, proverbial expressions, that draw on “ancestral knowledge” to be summoned in daily conversations, the last of these being “quien baila y canta, sus males espanta.” This one is not translated, but I’d offer that it has to do with dancing and singing as a way to chase away life’s sorrows, a cultural meme that is amply illustrated in the pages of this charming and informative book.
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[Review length: 990 words • Review posted on April 12, 2024]