Enduring Legacies: Ethnic Histories and Cultures of Colorado

1: Pictorial Narratives of San Luis, Colorado: Legacy, Place, and Politics

23 So, anyway I created that [embroidery of La Sierra]. It was more of a contemporary kind of thing, but it was history. And I thought, “If I don’t get this down . . . now that it’s happening, somebody might not think of it as part of the historical documentation of the area.” —Josephine Lobato1 Traveling along State Highway 159 heading south to New Mexico, one passes through San Luis, locally acclaimed as the “Oldest Town in Colorado,” founded in 1851. At one of the main intersections in this small community is a mural—somewhat faded but still evocative of the community’s history and value system.2 Its themes represent local perceptions of the area’s legacy: the era of nomadic Indian tribes, a dynamic foreshortened view of the upper portion of the crucifix suspended in clouds from which Spanish conquistadors emerge, an allegorical rendering of the largesse of Mother Earth, and other panels depicting settlers, hunters, farmers, and scenes of adobe making. The mural’s prominent position advertises a symbolically constructed glimpse of the community’s belief system with respect to the primacy of Catholicism, ethnic heritage and pride, and a deep connectedness to the earth through hunting and agriculture. Among these various images, one of the most binding Pictorial Narratives of San Luis, Colorado: Legacy, Place, and Politics 1 Suzanne P. MacAulay 24 Pictorial Narratives of San Luis, Colorado elements around which the San Luis community coheres is land—its constancy , its use, and the power exercised through its possession and maintenance . The links between the belief in land as a God-given birthright and the Spanish conquest of the region in the name of God and religion is apparent in the mural’s iconic arrangement of conquistadors, Christ, and cultivation. This chapter investigates the local sense of place and heritage in San Luis through a study of ethnicity and the ways cultural identity is conceived and constructed. By analyzing the processes of place making and identifying the forces of cultural politics active in San Luis, we ask how “understandings of locality, community and region are formed and lived [in this particular place].”3 In addition, the notion of material culture as an objectification of cultural values and a group’s aesthetic system is considered basic to this inquiry. This discussion argues for the importance of material objects in the formation of personal and collective identities and demonstrates how this operates in terms of the creative work of a particular San Luis artist, Josephine Lobato. Lobato creates embroidered narratives about Hispanic life in the San Luis Valley using an innovative style derived from a traditional Spanish colonial textile technique known as colcha embroidery. Colcha, in its modified contemporary version as a stitched pictorial narrative (visual storytelling) linked to a historical creative practice, becomes a means to explore issues of colonial legacy and ancestral rights. Its mode of creation also relies on reflexivity as a form of artistic and meditative feedback flowing between art and life’s experiences. Thus an ethnographic examination of ethnicity and sense of place along with an art historical descriptive analysis take “culture” as the subject of investigation and work together to foreground a specific genre of artwork as critical to the interplay of aesthetic and socio-cultural interaction in San Luis. San Luis is located in one of the most impoverished counties in Colorado, Costilla County. It is a place of contrast—rich in natural resources yet poor economically. It is also culturally distinct from other towns in the area. In recent years, when ethnic solidarity emerging in the face of historic Anglo dominance in this region has been invigorating self-esteem and community pride, the issues of land and birthright are crucial determinants of legitimacy. As broadcast through the imagery of the “civic” mural, in present-day San Luis the prevailing attitude identifies with a cultural legacy from Spain rather than Mexico. One year during the annual summer fiesta of Santana and Santiago, an older resident ardently informed me that San Luis townspeople label themselves as Spanish—not Latinos or Mexican Americans: “Somos españoles” (we are Spanish). The majority of San Luis residents use the terms “Hispano,” “Hispanic,” and “Spanish” interchangeably, with Hispanic the most frequent. Suzanne P. MacAulay 25 Thus community members’ cultural and genealogical understanding of heritage (as publicly espoused to outsiders) honors the persistence of Spanish lineage apart from the vicissitudes of time and birthplace. The...