Archaeological Landscapes on the High Plains

7. Purgatorio, Purgatoire, or Picketwire: Negotiating Local, National, and Transnational Identities along the Purgatoire River in Nineteenth-Century Colorado

173 In the IntroductIon to their book Archaeologies of Landscape, A. Bernard Knapp and Wendy Ashmore (1999) divide the assembled authors’ treatments of landscape into four themes: “landscape as memory, landscape as identity, landscape as social order, and landscape as transformation.” These themes refer to the ways people conceptualize, perceive, and shape landscapes and how landscapes, in turn, shape human behavior. The themes are defined without reference to what some have considered in many cases false dichotomies of “natural” versus “cultural” landscapes or implicitly hierarchical core versus peripheral or frontier areas; the editors instead refer to heterarchically “nested” or linked spaces, the cultural meanings of which change, coexist, and overlap (Knapp and Ashmore 1999). In their examples, conceptual and spatial linkages connect architecture and land within specifically ritual places, but I contend here that such nested spaces can also be conceptualized in mundane s e v e n Minette C. Church Purgatorio, Purgatoire, or Picketwire: Negotiating Local, National, and Transnational Identities along the Purgatoire River in Nineteenth-Century Colorado M inette C . C h ur Ch 174 spaces shaped by daily practice and in scalar terms ranging from nation and region to homestead, campsite, and field. In the Anglo/Hispano borderlands of southern Colorado, national affiliations and boundaries as well as local use of space have long been, and still are, linked in processes of contestation and negotiation of identities and multiple senses of place. Choices and uses of material culture are linked in much the same way (Clark 2005; Deutsch 1987). The sites discussed here are located along a tributary of the Arkansas River, an area that was for generations a region of contested and changing international borders (Figure 7.1). The creation of homelands of memory, identity, social order, and transformation is ongoing in this area and arguably, given the abundance and variety of rock art, dates back to at least the Archaic period. I will focus here, however, on the nineteenth century. International rivalries in this era were very dynamic, and Michael Kearney has noted that people in such situations “create transnational spaces that may have the potential to liberate nationals within them,” to a degree, from strong state controls (Kearney 1995:553). This contrasts strongly with older frontier and core/periphery models, where strong state controls were assumed, and is more in line with current models, which account for more variability (e.g., Hall 2000; Limerick 1987, 1996). For purposes of this chapter, although I do refer to this region’s status within larger structures of nationalism and power, I am more interested in examining particular case studies that show how these larger processes played out during this dynamic period among actors on the ground, along the Purgatoire River. Cristina Blanc and her colleagues noted that “individuals and groups renegotiate and contest their positions and identities within these transformed but still inherently hierarchical discourses of power. . . . [N]ewly created transnational spaces are sites at which new and multiple identities are fashioned and a variety of old and new forms of power or domination exercised” (Blanc, Basch, and Schiller 1995:684). Here I will present a regional case study of such processes using, primarily, two archaeological sites situated in southeastern Colorado, broader observations on archaeological settlement patterns, and documents generated by site occupants that allow us some access to their perspectives on these changes. While I do not go into twenty-first-century local or national politics in any depth, the importance of understanding these processes in the nineteenth century has implications for current debates ranging from “English only” educational initiatives and immigration reform, to lawsuits over Mexican-period land grants (Stoller 1997), to a military proposal to displace local ranchers by means of sale and eminent domain. Understanding the past in this area Purgatorio, Purgatoire, or Picketwire 175 has impacts on the present. Along the Purgatoire River in southern Colorado, negotiations of identity and corollary creation of spaces happened at scales ranging from international disputes over national borders to the way groups and individuals negotiated fluid individual identities within changing contexts . These political situations, both local and national, demonstrate that such negotiations are ongoing. FIguRe 7.1. Map of the High Plains, highlighting sites discussed in this chapter. Illustration by Kevin Gilmore. M inette C . C h ur Ch 176 For the most part, scholarly discussion of transnational strategies and processes has pertained primarily to the present or the very recent past and has...