Recognizing Heritage: The Politics of Multiculturalism in New Mexico

1. Constructing History at the Palace of the Governors

CHAPTER ONE Constructing History at the Palace of the Governors The Palace of the Governors, a one-story adobe building on the north side of the Santa Fe plaza, has always been Santa Fe’s most famous landmark. Its front facade has become a tourist icon (see fig. 2). Under the front portal of the Palace, Indian artists display handcrafted jewelry, pottery, and other goods, and tourists amble along, inspecting the art and enjoying a quintessential New Mexican cultural experience. The Palace is often described as the oldest continuously occupied public building in the United States. Yet how people have thought about and used the Palace has changed significantly over time. Constructed around 1610 when Spanish colonists moved the capital to Santa Fe from San Gabriel (north of Santa Fe on the Rio Grande), the Palace was originally part of a fortified complex of buildings known as the casas reales, or royal houses.1 For three hundred years the Spanish, Mexican, and American governors of New Mexico used the Palace for residential and office space, modifying the building to suit their evolving needs and tastes. A notable exception was the twelve years following the Pueblo Revolt of 1680, when Pueblo Indians occupied the building. Then in 1909, three years before New Mexico became a state, the territorial legislature designated the Palace the home of the newly established Museum of New Mexico and School of American Archaeology. Equally significant a transformation has occurred since then, as the Palace has gone from being a museum mostly about southwestern history, anthropology, and art to being a museum about itself. In 1960 it became a National Histor- 22 The Palace of the Governors ic Landmark, the highest distinction given to historic sites in the United States. In this chapter I track how the Palace of the Governors became a sign of history and explore the political effects of that process. Inverting the usual view of the Palace as a history museum inside a historic structure, I show that its construction as a historic site has relied upon its development as a museum. This process has subtly —and perhaps inadvertently—reinforced American power in New Mexico. The Palace illustrates several colonial functions of “history,” which I take to be a discursive construct. Many scholars have shown that equating history with Europe and casting all non-Europeans as people without history contributed to the invention of modernity and the establishment of European colonial hegemony. But when modernity is conceived as a transcendent achievement, “history” can serve as its foil. To be modern in this view is to rise above history. The ultimate modernity begins with the end of history. Fig. 2. The Palace of the Governors. The Palace of the Governors 23 In New Mexico the notion of “prehistory” persists, despite the fact that Native Americans recorded historical change orally before Spanish colonization. Histories of New Mexico usually begin with Spanish exploration and colonization. People take the historicalness of Spaniards, Mexicans, and nineteenth-century Americans for granted. However, the division of New Mexico history into sequential Spanish, Mexican, and American “periods” suggests that Hispanics’ time is over and done with. Both Indians and Nuevomexicanos, then, are associated with the past. While the former are excluded from history, the latter are relegated to it. Meanwhile, twentieth-century Anglos often appear beyond history altogether and in control of New Mexico’s present and future. The Palace of the Governors has been a key site in the construction of history and modernity in New Mexico for more than a century now. The first part of this chapter examines the cultural politics surrounding the Museum of New Mexico’s establishment in the early 1900s. After a major renovation, museum staff promoted the Palace as a monument to Santa Fe’s glorious Spanish past and as a modern scientific institution that exempli- fied American achievement. These romantic and scientific views of the Palace were complementary, allowing Anglos to assert their dominance as both preservationists and pioneers. Museum administrators envisioned a linear, progressive New Mexican history that led from the Indian and Spanish past to the American future . Far from denigrating or erasing pre-American culture and history in New Mexico, they celebrated them and put them on display . The Palace contained and brought order to the past. The second part of the chapter examines the more recent development of this process of containment...