Nuevomexicano Cultural Memory and the Indo-Hispana Mujerota

The strong and independent character of the women of the borderlands is signified in the term mujerota in the folk idiom of the northern Río Grande. Used to invoke the mythical, historical, and everyday women of the region known once as New Spain, then Mexico, and now as the southwestern United States, “mujerota” in the context discussed here honors the significant social impact such women exerted in their time and later. In a land twice invaded and colonized first by Hispanic and then Anglo-American cultures, through the lens of gender, we will explore evolving ideas of indigeneity, assimilation, resistance, and cultural hybridity through the paradigmatic figure of the mujerota, the idealized and real strong-woman who reproduces family, culture, and society (Deutsch 1987: 48, 205; Schulman and Smith 1963: 230–231).¹

The entire region of the northern Río Grande can be understood as a “contact zone” where the dynamics of cultures in competition involve language and all aspects of material and expressive culture. The colonial encounter of the diverse Natives with the Spanish empire was marked by “conditions of coercion and radical inequality, and intractable conflict” (Pratt 1992: 6). Hybrid cultures emerged that have been called “antiguo mestizo,” the Indo-Hispano blend (Lamadrid and García 2012: 96). After independence from Europe, two republics drew their borders, and a “border zone” emerged with a nascent “new mestiza/o” culture (Anzaldúa 1987). In the southern reaches of the Río Grande in Texas, the border became the Río Grande itself. In the river’s northern waters in New Mexico, the physical border moved 850 kilometers, and an immense border zone was created. To the Nuevomexicanos “crossed by the border,” the line of separation became interiorized and psychological, re-negotiated with every interaction. This continuous negotiation marks cultural difference, which extends to women—las mujeres—and the understanding of their role in this cultural dynamic.

Indigenous Mothers of Spain, New Spain, and New Mexico

In the European tradition of the idealization of the feminine divine and locating divinity within humanity, the search for God necessarily leads to the Mother of God. Native American traditions begin with the Grandmother Earth and the Mothers of the animals and plants upon which human life depends—like the Corn and Deer Mothers of New Mexico. Colonial-era encounters produced a syncretic confluence of belief and practice, the spiritual contexts of the mestiza mujerota, indigenous to place.

Indigeneity is rooted in cultures of habitat, those human groups longest associated with a place (Nabhan 1997). As colonial societies invade the realms of other societies and subordinate their cultures, indigeneity becomes synonymous with the colonized, and women thus are doubly indigenous in contested places (Osowski 2010: 104–105). Yet women have also engaged in (willingly and without choosing) cultural hybridity in zones of contestation and intercultural contact. Spain and New Spain are culturally complex areas where for many centuries women have negotiated and defined indigeneity, from the spiritual plane of the feminine divine through the women of history to the sociological role of the mujerota.

The Iberian peninsula, the homeland of the invaders of the Americas, was itself invaded many times by land and sea, a site of continuous “indigenization” in a continuously emergent process. Invaders became native to place over the course of generations. The tribal peoples of the peninsula absorbed Rome’s incursions, assimilating and tempering Latin, the imperial language. Christianity was naturalized to the peninsula after Jesus assigned his closest cousin, Santiago, the “Son of Thunder,” to the end of the earth to spread the gospel, according to Christian legend. Mary appears in Iberia during her earthly lifetime and her long geographic association with Spain creates a sense of her indigeneity there. The first and most famous bilocation of the Virgin Mary is remembered as Santa María del Pilar, since she appeared simultaneously at her home in Palestine and on top of a pillar on the banks of the Ebro River in Spain (Gutiérrez Lasanta 1971). Spain still...