Land of Disenchantment: Latina/o Identities and Transformations in Northern New Mexico (review)

Michael Trujillo's new book Land of Disenchantment evokes a "something else" that his forbears in scholarship failed to capture in their "stifling positivity" and "romantic ethnographies of the region" (p. xii). The text is a "social and creative anthropological commentary" on the Española valley confronting issues (drugs, poverty, land loss, diminishing language use) salient to its emergence, transition, and transformation under the shadow of post-colonial, industrio-techno capitalism emanating from an ever-encroaching mainstream Anglo America. With brutal honesty, Trujillo deftly dissects infamously negative dramas in order to explore the complex historical and social identity of northern New Mexico, a destination of border crossers long before Columbus or before "Marco Cholo" discovered Española.

Trujillo considers porblems inherent in using terms about ethnic identity and then settles on Nuevomexicano when referring to the primary subjects in his ethnography, and his ancestral ties to the region inform his sensitivities—a connection leading to special knowledge and insight not always evident in social science research. Acknowledging that there is "no single correct popular term" (p. xv), the author also uses other terms throughout the book: Chicano, Hispanic, New Mexican, Latino, norteño, mestizo, genizaro, and northern New Mexican, thus amplifying the convolution and nuance that language and naming play in the subjectivity of this topic, as well as underscoring the irresolvable conflict intrinsic to the moving target of classifying race and ethnicity.

Trujillo justifies his focus on the negative, suggesting that his book is intended to "both invoke and employ certain oppositional politics" that may instigate healing while "assert(ing) an openness and affirmation that resists violence and denial" (p. xvi). While tendering no solution, he points to the next steps for activists, intellectuals, teachers, politicians, counselors, and community leaders invested in the shaping and reshaping of a postmodern Española identity that (1) springs forth from residual elements of land-based Christian and indigenous cultures specially connected to familial and intra-communal bonds, (2) provides for moral, spiritual, and intellectual guidance through a seemingly perennial emergent phase, and (3) competes economically while satisfying a native and mysterious desire to connect to one's linguistic, geographic, and historical past.

Trujillo identifies the dialectical tension found in the region—Hispanic vs. Anglo, Native vs. Colonial, Española vs. Santa Fe and Los Alamos, positive vs. negative—and he asserts that "there is a little bit of Española in every New Mexico community" (p. 14). These oppositions pit an idealized Española—the commodified pastoral image of grand vistas and lush fields of chile and alfalfa that generations of "Anglo" artists such as Georgia O'Keeffe have cashed in on—against the realized conundrum of loss of land, low graduation rates, drug addiction, and lack of economic opportunity. Shown is a universal resistance to modernism's imprint on a purer and more "primitive" existence and an antithetical positionality that contradicts the "Land of Enchantment" modernist narrative. Trujillo probes the epistemology of Española as it confronts the reification of its richly multifarious—albeit idiosyncratic and out-of-the-mainstream—persona (witness gleaming low-riders on mainstreet) by drive-by tourists, politicians, and even social scientists.

Trujillo's power lies in his ability to interweave thick literary descriptions with densely critical ethnographic analyses, consistently forcing the issue of comfort and discomfort in one's own skin: in chapter 7, local author and scholar G. Benito Cordova reads of a fictional "pissing match" between Georgia O'Keeffe and a drunken Chimayoso to a genteel and disgusted audience at an exclusive Santa Fe college; in chapter 6, the putative Chicano "interloper," Jim Sagel, ultimately commits suicide after a life dedicated to writing award-winning literature with Española as its protagonist; in chapter 3, Cristo in the Española Fiesta parade carries an oversized hypodermic needle as a cross; chapter 2 unfolds the heart-rending story of Good Friday pilgrims, a teenage couple, murdered...