Querencia: Reflections on the New Mexico Homeland ed. by Vanessa Fonseca-Chávez, Levi Romero and Spencer R. Herrera (review)

Eastern Agency Navajo landscape oil on canvas 2020
Jeremy Singer

Identity, place, belonging, and resilience are common elements throughout Querencia: Reflections on the New Mexico Homeland edited by Vanessa Fonseca-Chávez, Levi Romero and Spencer Herrera. New Mexico's revered cultural worker, journalist and writer, Juan Estevan Arellano used the term querencia to denote a profound understanding and love of place. In Querencia, this deep connection between the people and their "love of home," and "connection to place," is critically demonstrated through an anthology of fifteen different pieces from a wide range of scholars, activists, and community members, along with opening remarks from the late New Mexico Master of Letters, Rudolfo Anaya and New Mexico's Centennial Poet Laureate, Levi Romero.

Anaya discusses not only querencia's role in its connection to place, but as a special relationship with la madre tierra, with ancestral knowledge, and with community. Anaya states, ". . . querencia is embodying the wisdom that our ancestors passed down to us. The history they created is our querencia, and we must know it and honor it," (xvi) and, "if querencia is anything, it is respect for vecinos, love for the sacred earth, knowing that el agua es vida" (xvii). Romero poses several important questions underscoring the essays in Querencia including, "What does it mean to be "from" somewhere?" To which he adds, "When the camposantos' crosses are filled with the names of your loved ones, you can say you're from here" (3). And, "Are people obligated to participate in the maintenance of their own querencia?" (11); "To leave or not to leave one's querencia is the ultimate dilemma" (8).

Each of the essays included in Querencia will be valuable for learning, maintaining and teaching the native knowledge of querencia while also peering into difficult tensions due to New Mexico's settler colonial histories. The five-part edition includes the following sections: "Community Querencias," "Screening Querencias," "Memory as Querencia," "Cultural Landscapes of Querencia" and "Storytelling of Querencia."

In "Community Querencias," themes of identity formation, story-telling and cross-cultural dialogue provide the reader with an understanding of how querencia can be recovered through cross-generational narratives and festival forms while also contesting colonial and eurocentric rhetoric through cross-cultural and interdisciplinary practice. "Screening Querencias" discusses what it means to live within and negotiate a space of contested querencia (80), elaborates upon a consciousness of opposition in the Bayard, New Mexico mining strikes of 1951 and portrayed in the film, Salt of the Earth; and critically investigates three popular forms of cultural production as different versions of querencia. "Memory as Querencia" magnifies Arrellano's notion of being "aware of the landscape which carries the memory of those who came before" (182) by challenging popular American history, rhetoric and propaganda with a critical memory of querencia. "Cultural Landscapes of Querencia" illustrates stark tensions between cross-cultural identities due to both historical trauma between Spanish-Mexican colonization and Indigenous communities and a continued glorification of such atrocities, proposes activist-based writing to serve as not only a means to cope with trauma, but as a way to oblige and activate readers to act, and suggests a cultural landscape framework for genízaro/Indo-Hispano communities to create an intergenerational model for cultural sustainability. "Storytelling as Querencia" celebrates the bond that individual and shared stories create in both New Mexico and in the diaspora.

Not only does Querencia invite the reader to explore the layered complexities of what it means to belong to a sacred land, it does so at a time when colonial monuments dedicated to glorifying violence towards Indigenous peoples of New Mexico have been taken down. These include the removal of Juan de Oñate and Diego de Vargas monuments in Albuquerque, Santa Fe, and Española following the upheaval against white supremacy with the Black...