The Santa Fe Fiesta, Reinvented: Staking Ethno-Nationalist Claims to a Disappearing Homeland (review)

In early September, many Santa Feans and tourists attend the Fiesta, a pageant celebrating the 1692 Spanish reconquest of New Mexico. Since 1712, first Hispanic settlers, then Anglos in the early 1900s, and again Hispanics in the second half of the twentieth century have utilized the Santa Fe Fiesta to extol a sanitized portrayal of “peaceful reconquest” and “tri-cultural harmony” constructed at Pueblo Indians’ expense. Anthropologist Sarah Bronwen Horton’s The Santa Fe Fiesta, Reinvented follows the known script of Hispanic political, demographic, and socioeconomic dispossession, and uses nationalism and internal colonialism to analyze the Fiesta as it evolved into the current celebration of Hispanic identity and cultural revivalism. More broadly, Horton’s case is an example of how cultural traditions and rituals affect the construction of ethnic nationalism in colonized societies. She argues that in the 1930s and 1940s, Hispanics regained and transformed the Anglo capitalist Fiesta into a religious and cultural celebration of Hispanic “claims to identity and territory” (11). Despite a sometimes forcedly polarized dichotomy between Hispanic traditionalism and Anglo capitalism, she combines superb narrative and fine interdisciplinary analysis to show the importance of culture in identity formation.

The book is organized thematically in eleven chapters, with numerous subsections and vignettes within each chapter that support her argument and reflect her deep knowledge of the Fiesta. As she admits, she was able to overcome the organizers’ suspicions by participating in less attended 6 a.m. Catholic prayers (15). The first four chapters contextualize Hispanic re-appropriation of the Fiesta within dispossession in twentieth-century New Mexico. Horton explores the restored religious meaning of the Fiesta through Hispanic organizations such as the Caballeros de Vargas, the Sociedad Folklórica, and the Confraternity of “La Conquistadora,” and the works of Hispanic historians and organizers. In the next five chapters, Horton examines how race, gender, and emigration have shaped New Mexican Hispanic nationalism. In a more critical tone, Horton contends that themes of “peaceful conquest” and “tri-cultural harmony”—key features of the Fiesta—paradoxically rest on racial discrimination and gender inequality. Building mainly upon the work of Ramón A. Gutiérrez and Anne McClintock, she shows the Fiesta’s portrayal of a sanitized Spanish gentleness and racial purity hides the violence perpetrated against Pueblo Indians and racial miscegenation, and perpetuates traditional gender roles of female chastity and male virility. Horton’s discussion on the Hispanic diaspora (chapter 10) relies on older migrants’ covert nostalgia that reinforces the traditionalist-modernist dichotomy.

Throughout the book, Horton combines vivid vignettes from her interviews with interdisciplinary analysis that borrows from disciplines like cultural anthropology, history, theoretical models of nationalism, and subaltern studies. Horton shifts from Benedict Anderson’s model of Western nationalism centered on literacy to focus on theories that emphasize rituals and sensibilities. Horton suggests that “[s]ensory forms . . . . such as ritual, performance, television, movies . . . perhaps constitute a more powerful force than print capitalism in rendering persuasive forms of belonging such as nationalism” (205). Yet notwithstanding this theoretical approach, a broader sample of interviews and a perusal of Mexican American historiography such as the works of John R. Chávez, Laura Hernández-Ehrisman, Arnoldo De León, and Andrew Leo Lovato would have attenuated her claim to New Mexico’s “unique history” (2) as well as the Anglo modern capitalist– Hispanic traditionalist binary. Because her ethnographic database builds upon veteran Hispanic participants and organizers of the Fiesta, the polarization between Hispanic traditionalism versus Anglo modernism intensifies. The exclusion of younger sources amplifies this methodological weakness.

Horton’s well-written book offers a valuable interdisciplinary addition to our understanding of the process of Hispanic cultural revitalization. It will be of use to those interested in the contributions of culture to the formation of Hispanic/Mexican American/Latino identities.