The Life and Writings of Fray Angélico Chávez: A New Mexico Renaissance Man (review)

To commemorate the 2010 centennial of Fray Angélico Chávez, literary scholar Ellen McCracken, professor of Spanish and comparative Latino/a literature at the University of California, Santa Barbara, provides an attractive volume analyzing the writings of the prominent New Mexico cleric. Essential to McCracken's reading of Chávez's literary legacy is the argument that with his ethnic identity as a Latino, the cleric reinserted "the Hispano presence in New Mexico into the master narrative of American history and culture" (6).

Born Manuel Ezequiel Chávez in the northern New Mexico village of Wagon Mound, Chávez departed his native state at age fourteen to pursue a decade of study at the St. Francis Seraphic Seminary in Cincinnati, Ohio, and other midwestern institutions of higher learning. In 1937 he returned to New Mexico as Fray Angélico Chávez. He was assigned to Peña Blanca, where he mediated a dispute between the Church and Santo Domingo Pueblo, ministered to the Peña Blanca church and school, restored two village churches, and began to explore a literary life with publication of his first two books, Clothed with the Sun (1939) and New Mexico Triptych (1940).

During World War II, Chávez served as chaplain in the Pacific, displaying in his poetry and sermons a hybrid identity forged by ethnicity, Catholicism, and patriotism. Following his war experience, Chávez began to focus his intellectual labors on history, organizing the colonial Church records of the archdiocese and writing such works as Our Lady of Conquest (1948) and Lamy Memorial (1949). After a brief stint as chaplain during the Korean War, Chávez was assigned to Jemez and placed in charge of three missions as well as serving as postmaster for Jemez Springs. Despite his numerous pastoral duties, Chávez continued to labor in the archives, often at the expense of his health. In 1954, Chávez published Origins of New Mexico Families and two years later The Missions of New Mexico, 1776 was released. McCracken concludes that Chávez's historical research "led him to an expanded sense of ethnicity and family identity, in which the entire Hispano community represented a single family ancestrally, culturally, historically and spiritually" (201).

Although Chávez's reputation as a Franciscan intellectual was acknowledged by scholars, McCracken documents that the cleric often believed that the Church failed to appreciate his academic work, and he lamented that it was difficult for him to find archival time. In 1964 he was reassigned to Peña Blanca, but in 1971 he announced that he was leaving the Church, criticizing "ecclesiastical colonialism," which characterized Hispanos as inferior people. Taking up residence in Santa Fe as a public intellectual, Chávez challenged traditional Franciscan historical narratives in My Penitente Land (1974) and celebrated his family contribution to New Mexico with Chávez: A Distinctive American Clan of New Mexico (1989). As his health deteriorated, he moved to the cathedral friary in Santa Fe, where he died in 1996.

McCracken makes a strong case for Chávez as a significant twentieth-century New Mexican intellectual whose Hispano identity governed his literary career, although he seamlessly connected his New Mexico Hispano ethnicity to American patriotism. But Chávez's scholarship is not without controversy. His depiction of martyred priests in the Pueblo Revolt does not always resonate with indigenous people. And while American Indian novelist N. Scott Momaday praised Chávez for his sensitivity while ministering to Jemez Pueblo, McCracken notes that perceptions of the "primitive other" sometimes colored his writing. Such controversy notwithstanding, McCracken makes extensive use of archival resources to document Fray Angélico Chávez as a New Mexican man of letters. Chávez would certainly appreciate and perhaps envy the archival labors of McCracken in crafting this centennial celebration.