Homelands: A Geography of Culture and Place across America

TEN: The Highland-Hispano Homeland

c h a p t e r t e n The Highland-Hispano Homeland . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Richard L. Nostrand The quincentennial celebration of Christopher Columbus’s encounter with the New World in 1992 reminded many in the United States of the major role Spaniards played in our history. Spaniards initiated the permanent European colonization of the United States—in Florida in 1565 and in New Mexico in 1598. In the 1700s they added present-day Arizona, Texas, Louisiana, and California to Spain’s colonial empire. Events in the 1800s forced Spain to relinquish political control of her northern frontier between Florida and California , yet her people and their landscape impress remained. And in the twentieth century additional waves of Spanish-speakers further Hispanicized the United States: Mexicans immigrated to the American Southwest and beyond after the Mexican Revolution of 1910, Puerto Ricans arrived in metropolitan New York after World War II, Cubans went to Florida after Fidel Castro’s revolution in 1959, and Latin Americans from a dozen or more countries headed for a variety of destinations beginning in the 1980s. Those who came in the twentieth century were leaving homelands, not creating them. Thus, homelands among Hispanic peoples in the United States derive from Spanish colonial times, and in this volume Daniel D. Arreola (chap. 7) and I argue their development among Tejanos in South Texas and Hispanos in New Mexico. The five frames in map 10.1 summarize how the Highland-Hispano homeland evolved. When Spaniards reached New Mexico in 1598, Franciscan friars and soldier-settlers moved right into the villages of the Pueblo In155 Map 10.1. The evolution of the Highland-Hispano homeland can be likened to the lifting up and partial collapse of an “island” on the land. In 1680 some 20 Spanish mission-conventos and Santa Fe formed enclaves in a low and otherwise uniform Pueblo Indian island. By 1790, 20 Pueblo villages now constituted enclaves in a low and otherwise uniform Hispano homeland island. By 1850, however, high Hispano percentages bolstered by larger Hispano numbers made the Hispano island stand more like a plateau, yet deep local depressions occurred at each of the 20 Pueblo villages (not shown) and at each of the eight large Hispano communities where Anglos had intruded. By 1900 the inner half of a now much enlarged Hispano island stood as a lofty plateau, but the island’s outer half, weighted down as it were by Anglos, now formed a lower plain. And by 1980 the steady arrival of Anglos left only one Hispano erosional remnant, the Chimayo Census County Division. Below it Hispanos formed a majority in parts of eleven counties, and below that the weight of Mexican Americans had been added to Anglos to further depress the island’s outer plain. Sources: see text. dians. In 1680, when the Pueblos revolted, Spaniards in the Pueblo villages and in Santa Fe formed enclaves in a Pueblo Indian realm (frame 1680). Successful in their revolt, the Pueblos drove the Spaniards south to the Paso del Norte district, but in 1693 the Spaniards returned in a permanent way, and by 1790 they had transformed the Pueblo Indian realm into what D. W. Meinig (1971, 92) called a “Hispano Stronghold” wherein the Pueblos’ villages were now the enclaves (frame 1790). When Anglos began to arrive in 1821, they created their own enclaves in Santa Fe and in other Hispano communities, but in 1850 the 55,000 Hispanos still constituted about 90 percent of the total homeland population (frame 1850). The Anglo intrusion continued, reducing the 140,000 Hispanos in 1900 to but 64 percent of their own region’s population . By 1900, when the homeland reached about its full areal extent, Hispanos still constituted more than 90 percent of the population in half the region (frame 1900). But the relentless Anglo onslaught continued, augmented now by the arrival of Mexican immigrants, and by 1980 Hispanos exceeded 90 percent only in the small Census County Division of Chimayo. In the entire homeland, 365,000 Hispanos represented only 20 percent of the population (frame 1980). As the proportion of Hispanos rose and fell over the four centuries, empirical evidence suggests that a positive correlation existed between areas of higher Hispano population and the degree to which Hispanos held a concept of their homeland. That concept, although abstract and elusive, concerns bonding to place. It has three basic elements: a people who lived in...