When we think about the “Faith of Our Forefathers and Foremothers” in the United States, we are often drawn, at least by standard American history texts, to thinking about English settlers on the eastern seaboard in “the original 13 colonies”. We are served a rather narrow historical perspective, as though only the English colonists make up the fabric of “our common history as Americans”. That perspective ignores the very real legacy of Native Americans, African Americans, Chinese, Japanese, and - the focus of my talk today - Hispanics.
Anglo-Americans began arriving in the Southwest in significant numbers following the acquisition of the Louisiana Purchase in 1803. With that territorial addition, their thirst for the actualization of what became known as Manifest Destiny resulted, in part, in declaring unprovoked war on Mexico in 1846. Two of the significant legacies of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which settled the final outcome of the Mexican-American War, were that Mexico lost half its territory to the United States and, as a result of Anglo-American settlement of the Southwest, there was, as least in New Mexico, a high rate of intermarriage between Anglo and Hispanic families. I am one person who resulted from such an ethnic union. In New Mexico, those of us who are products of mixed ethnic heritage are known as coyotés.
I can trace my maternal family lineage back to Antonio Pedro Cedillo y Cabeza de Baca, who was given, by the Spanish king, land grants to 2 of the 5 counties in New Spain (north of the Rio Grande) in 1592. When New Mexico gained statehood in 1912, my great-grandfather Antonio Abad Sedillo was one of 92 signers of the New Mexico Constitution, and is well remembered in New Mexico for helping to draft provisions of Spanish American rights into the state’s political charter, including the assurance that Spanish would be an official language alongside English. My 3rd cousin, Senator Joseph Montoya, was in 1964 the 2nd Hispanic to be elected to the U.S. Senate. In the mid-1960’s he was a major proponent of “multiculturalism” and bilingual education.
With that as background, I am emphasizing, this morning, the ways in which our forefathers and mothers dealt with the problematic nature of ‘race’ and ‘class’ in American culture. As noted in the introductory reading, Hispanic New Mexicans have had their own struggles with “cultural identity”. They faced discrimination at the hands of Anglo Americans who had, in 1848, invaded their homeland and had become, by dent of being the ‘dominant power’, the ones who defined acceptable culture. That the Anglos, not the Hispanics, were the immigrants, did not affect which cultural group faced discrimination in education, employment, and property rights.
My Spanish forefathers and foremothers struggled to figure out a way to both have a strong and resilient sense of cultural pride while at the same time focusing on assimilation into the larger fabric of Americanism. Many peoples who have immigrated to the United States have faced this dilemma, and it has historically been a public policy debate in America: How can each culture retain and maintain a distinctive sense of racial and/or ethnic pride while simultaneously trying to ‘fit in’ to what other Americans consider ‘what it means to be’ American? And what ‘story’, whether historically accurate or not, does each culture construct ‘about itself’ that ‘defines’ them?
The story Hispanic New Mexicans “told themselves” (which some writers have termed “Spanish Fantasy Heritage”) was a method of reacting to Anglo prejudice without directly engaging Anglo biases. Since successful Spanish Americans were forced to feel the pain of discrimination, their defense was to gild and glorify the past which is now lost to them forever. As an extension, Spanish Americans reacted to racism’s taint of anyone labeled Mexican by calling themselves “white” and denying any Indian mixture in their past. This belief, which is a cultural reality that never really existed in colonial New Mexico, became a useful ideology as a protection against Anglo prejudice, loss of property and a limitation of civil rights. Yet, in contrast to this, it has also been the Hispanic New Mexicans’ unshakable American patriotism that has made them “perennially suspicious of causes and programs based on racism”.
At a fundamental level, what my forefathers and foremothers have taught me is that, while it is important to create, for oneself, a distinctive cultural identity of which one can be proud, it is equally important to construct a more inclusive ‘American’ identity that is multi-cultural. It is that struggle, between cultural distinctiveness and cultural assimilation, and the resulting inner emotional conflict, that makes what it means to be “American” so very problematic.